"Brexit and the Perils of Comparison" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (26 June 2016)

No strangers to referenda, even as Brexit is reminiscent of the 1967 Opinion Poll to Goans, the two are far from being alike. 

Indeed, it was just a generation ago that Goans saw their fate decided by a referendum. The January 1967 Opinion Poll, which followed the 1961 annexation of Goa by India, allowed Goans to elect whether their homeland would be merged with the adjoining state of Maharashtra. My parents’ generation decided that Goa and Goans deserved to preserve their own cultural identity as reflected by the vote for the region’s geographic insularity. Nearly a half-century later, the fate of many Goans once again hangs in the balance as the results of another referendum on another continent are announced. The Brexit poll has concluded and, by a very slim majority, the people of the United Kingdom have chosen to leave the European Union. 

On the surface, the polls may seem similar even though five decades separate them. Both the Opinion Poll and Brexit were about a decision to be part of a union, even if the former was to initiate a merger while the latter was to leave one. Nonetheless, the Opinion Poll sought to further undermine the autonomy of Goan people by seeking to obliterate the geopolitical boundary that, if nothing else, gave Goans a distinct cartographic location within the Indian union. 

It should not be remiss that caste politics played out in the mobilisation efforts to galvanise Goan participation in the Opinion Poll. What could easily be mistaken for a show of Goan solidarity is but a veneer for the truth that if Goa were to become a part of Maharashtra, those of the upper castes would lose their mini fiefdom. This is not to suggest that a merger with that other state would have improved the situation. Rather, the results of the 1967 poll might also be analysed as the outcome of a decision by Goan bahujans whose solidarity lay with their own land and community, regardless of upper caste political designs. The interests of the elite would have remained the same regardless of whether Maharashtra were to take over or were Goa to remain separate. 

However, even as these caste fractures within Goa are obfuscated, what the Opinion Poll further sought to occlude was that though it was a democratic exercise, it was one within a limited gamut. Goans were being given a choice in 1967 – a belated one that should have been theirs in 1961: not whether they should or should not merge with Maharashtra, but whether they should be part of the now-independent, formerly British India or not. If anything, the Opinion Poll was a means for India to further establish its hold over Goa through the charade of democracy. 

That Brexit impacts Goans is precisely because our tiny part of the world was once under the Portuguese Empire and only later under the Indian one. In contradistinction to those Goans who made their way to the United Kingdom via British East Africa in the last century, the more recent waves of Goan immigrants who have journeyed to England directly from Goa have done so as Portuguese citizens; their European nationality allows them to work anywhere within the Union. The later immigrants have largely been working class people who have sought to better their lives abroad while also adding to the labour pool and tax revenues of Britain.

To say that Brexit is this Goan generation’s Opinion Poll would not be euphemistic. Yet, even as this vote affects Goans and so many others, the two referenda are not alike. The Opinion Poll was a decision by a colonised people to retain their identity, while Brexit is the expression of a very old and powerful empire flexing its clout in the modern era. The United Kingdom may be a kingdom only nominally, but as the birthplace of neoliberalism alongside the United States, it continues to function imperially, extending its colonial legacy of yore. Where the Opinion Poll drew the line around a minority, Brexit draws one against immigrants and refugees. Some hope is to be had in that only a little more than half of Britain voted for the exit, but it also shows a nation split and one that too conveniently forgets its history.

What is to become of those Goans who continue to be Portuguese citizens in the United Kingdom? What of the many Goans whose dreams of reacquiring Portuguese citizenship so that they could better their opportunities may now come to a standstill? Time will tell, but it will be a worrying wait as Europe and the rest of the world grows more xenophobic and the labours of the once and still colonised continue to underwrite the progress of the powerful. 

From The Goan.

"Of Ghana and Goa" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (4 October 2015)

That East Africa figures quite commonly in literature from and about Goa is evidence of how the presence of the Goan diaspora in Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar (now Tanzania) has influenced the socio-cultural imagination of a tiny region. In turn, this proves that its size notwithstanding, Goa has long been connected to many parts of the world. At the recently concluded conference “Africa-Asia: A New Axis of Knowledge”, organized by the International Institute for Asian Studies, a Netherlands-based entity, and hosted at the University of Ghana, Legon (24-26 September, 2015), I presented a paper on the place of Goa and Goans in the literary connections between the two continents. In so doing, I wished to draw attention to how the continent of Africa had played a role in the Portuguese coming to and, then, leaving Goa. It struck me during my time in Accra that though much can be said about the Goan-East African nexus, the case is less so for how one might think of Goa’s associations with other parts of the continent, and with West Africa in particular.

Although the first of its kind, the Africa-Asia academic conference no doubt harked back to the Bandung Conference of 1955, especially since this year marks the 60^th anniversary of the meeting that was the precursor to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Of the twenty-nine African and Asian nations that participated in the Indonesian conference, some were newly independent, including India. The major focus of the Bandung meeting were deliberations over the solidarity of Third World nations; how might they be champions of peace in the era of decolonization and also in relation to the beginnings of the Cold War period?  Though the spirit of Bandung began to dissipate by the 1960s, it was an important moment of South-South collaborations. 

 

In contrast, the academic conference I participated in seemed to focus more on economic prowess in today’s Afro-Asiatic relations, and notably China’s growing participation in various African industries, including construction and finance. Nonetheless, there were also presentations on the influence of multiculturality and globalization on cultural production and social relations. This was demonstrated in the research of scholars working on convergences between Indian and Nigerian filmmaking and film-viewership, but also by those studying South Asian diasporic communities in Ghana and elsewhere. Indeed, what was made apparent in following these various strands of the conference was how even the examination of South-South relationships are still haunted by contemporary Western influence or the colonial past. So, for instance, China’s current role in Africa is generally seen as being akin to US international involvement, while the afterlife of diasporic movement – particularly in South Asian-African contexts – is largely regarded within circuits once prescribed by British coloniality.

Perhaps Goa’s ties with Africa offer alternative lines of consideration. Not only was Goa a conduit between Portuguese and British India, but Goans also journeyed for work to both Portuguese and British Africa. But prior to such transit which became common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Portuguese had already been deeply entrenched in the African slave trade, with both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans being employed for that purpose. As a result, African slaves were brought to Portuguese India, and their bloodlines and descendants continue to be part of our heritage, despite our penchant for racialized colourism and casteism. 

At the end of the colonial period, Africa also played a part in ending Portuguese colonization in Goa. In West Africa, Angola had begun agitating against the Portuguese in 1961, a year of much import to Goa. Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau were soon to follow suit. It was also in 1961 that Nehru came to formally institute NAM, along with Kwame Nkrumah – independent Ghana’s first Prime Minister – along with leaders from other nations. Pressured by leaders of the anti-colonial movement in Africa who asked Nehru to take action against the Portuguese in Goa because it would abet the decolonization of Luso-Africa, India’s first Prime Minister launched an attack on the region in December 1961. While it had been the intention of African leadership to see the end of Portuguese colonization in Asia, Nehru’s military action not only delimited Goan self-determination, but also annexed Goa to the existing Indian nation-state. 

In these decades after the end of European colonization in Africa and Asia, and even as globalization brings in new forms of power hierarchies, perhaps it is time to rethink South-South relations along other axes of knowledge. While accounting for the importance of economics, trade, and politics, there is also a rich terrain of history, literature, culture, and community that deserves consideration. As the Goan example highlights, even a small place can reveal the complexities of intercontinental associations that run on multiple levels while offering perspectives on the past and direction for the future.

From The Goan.

"Some Other Country" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - June 2014)

Night had fallen on Melbourne by the time I had gotten through immigration and customs. I made my

way through the crowd of smiling people, some holding up “Welcome Home!” signs. For a moment, I entertained the possibility that at least one of them could be for me. In the arrivals area, I found a quiet spot and, fortunately, free wifi – always such a boon to itinerants. There was just enough power on my phone to send a quick message to let my folks know I had arrived safely. For a long while, I stood by my luggage cart and eyed the exit. I was not ready, just yet, to leave the neutral space of the airport, and step into terra incognita.

Sure, I had found myself in this same situation many times before. But it never ceases to feel daunting, that alienness of being on the precipice of starting life anew. En route to Australia, I broke my journey in Beirut. At immigration in Lebanon, I surmised that the officer was asking me if I spoke Arabic, but being unable to respond in that tongue, I apologized in English. “How come?” He interrogated. “You were born in Kuwait,” he said, jabbing his finger at the tell-tale information in my American passport.

Just a few weeks prior, the moustachioed official collecting departure cards at Bombay’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport – which will always be Sahar Airport to me from my childhood memories of transiting through there between Kuwait and Goa to see my grandmother – insisted on speaking to me in Hindi. As if to go with the nationalistically inclined name change of the airport, he questioned my inability to articulate myself fluently in “the mother tongue” that is completely unknown to my mother who was born and raised in East Africa. Waving my Overseas Citizenship of India card in my face, he chastised me, in Hindi, for not speaking the language of “your country.” I thought of the title of that novel, the one in which James Baldwin writes, “The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world.” I thought of 1961, the year in which Goa ceased being Estado da Índia Portuguesa and, without the benefit of a local referendum to ascertain the will of its people, was handed over to India some fourteen years after a certain “Tryst with Destiny.” I signed my Portuguese name on the exit form, and departed the country that neither of my parents, nor I, had been born in.  

“It’s not just another country for you,” a friend remarked. “It’s a whole other continent.” Nonetheless, some things were immediately familiar, I thought to myself as I prepared the cash to pay the taxi

driver near the end of the ride from Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport. For instance, there was the crowned head on the heavy currency – the paradoxically common royal visage on the coinage of the Commonwealth. I remember her well from those days of scrounging together my all too uncommon wealth as a student in London. And English is spoken here – that other imperial legacy. I thought of 1968, the year in which England withdrew the right of entry to British passport holders from its former colonies and how the lie was given to the concept of the Commonwealth. I thought of “Rivers of Blood,” Enoch Powell’s speech delivered that same year, in which he proclaimed, “Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another's.” The rising anti-immigrant sentiment resulted in the turning away of exiles, some of them South Asians from once British East Africa. Never mind that they were part of Britain’s history, or that they spoke “the same language.”

There was an awkward silence when the cab driver finally ended the call he had been on from the time he had picked me up. I had gathered from the phone conversation that he was Punjabi. “How long have you lived here?” I enquired. “Ten years.” After another protracted pause, he asked, “You’re here for work?” I nodded. “Yes. New job.” He said, “Good, good.” Leaning forward in my seat, I queried, “So, some years ago, there were those attacks, no? On Indian students… Some were murdered?” His head bobbed in assent. “But it is safe. You know… just mind your own business. You do your work and you go home after and everything will be fine.”

I thought about whose home this country really is and I thought of homelessness. I thought of 1869 and the ironically named Aboriginal Protection Act, which led to the Stolen Generations of state-abducted indigenous children. I thought of Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence, which was turned into a film and tells the story of just such Aboriginal children who had been taken away from their families. I thought of the earliest South Asians to come to this country, the so called “Afghans” who served as cameleers in the 1860s, transporting goods across Australia’s deserts - Muslim men who married into Aboriginal communities. I thought of the migrant who goes everywhere and belongs nowhere. “This is your stop,” the driver announced as he slowed down. “All the best!”

This article appears in the June 2014 issue of India Currents. A shorter version of it can be read in The Goan.

"Avoid the Mansion" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (21 June 2014)

I had visited Hong Kong for the first time shortly before the British were to return the city-state to China. There was a palpable sense of uncertainty on the island. I wondered if this is how it had been in Goa in 1961 as the enclave lingered between Portugal and India. My layover in Hong Kong was on the return journey from what had been my first visit back to Goa after I had emigrated to California. Already, I missed being with family and friends. 

Seeking a sense of familiarity, I followed the spice route – or at least the fragrance of spices – in the narrow hallways of the building in which I was rooming and arrived at a tiny Indian eating place. It was so nondescript, it could not even be called a restaurant. Mostly incongruous because it was nestled in a skyscraper, it fit right in with the other eateries and little guest houses crammed into the many floors of the building. Throughout this Kowloon landmark, backpackers, entrepreneurs, and clients from across the globe made up its hustle and bustle. Infamously captured in a Wong Kar Wai film, the ground floor shopping area had been reduced to nothing more than a seedy underworld. There was much comfort to be had in this world within, ensconced as I was among these fellow migrants of similar hue. It was the best Indian meal I have ever eaten. True, I do not even recall, now, what the dish was. All that mattered was that it was eye-wateringly pungent and that the South Indian waiter, who nodded a welcome, had filled my plate with more food than that of any of the other patrons there. 

Nearly twenty years on, at a dessert cafe in a back alley that can only be described as a hipster paradise because we are seated by the side of trashcans and the weekend crowd we are engulfed in would not have frequented this neighbourhood in times past, I tell the people I am with that I had been to the now-Chinese territory before. They are a group of expatriate architects that I meet because of the conference I am attending in Hong Kong. “I’m sorry,” one of them scoffs when I say the name of the place where I had resided. He recapitulates quickly upon not receiving the reaction he had expected. “They’ve cleaned it up lots, I believe,” he equivocates. 

Certainly, when I stopped by the building a few hours prior, I had noticed the changes. An anthropologist colleague had accompanied me to the iconic building which she had read about in Gordon Mathews’ book, Ghetto at the Center of the World. There, we found what we had scoured the entire city for – a pair of dolls from the Disney movie Frozen. The popularity of the film had caused the toys to fly off shelves and appear on eBay at several times their original value. “My daughter will be so thrilled,” the anthropologist said as she studied the knock-offs. “And when she’s old enough, there’ll be even more of the story to tell her because I got them here,” she mused, as we walked around the warren of shops. The place had not changed to the point of being unrecognizable. Somehow, in this ultramodern city, it had managed to retain its unsanitised history – a hive of multiculturality, at once retrograde and the very definition of globalised modernity. 

Just before leaving for Hong Kong on that maiden voyage two decades prior, a European student who was on holiday in Goa gave me some advice on traveling to the then colony. “Whatever you do,” she warned, “do not stay at the Chunking Mansion.” I remember staring up at the sign outside the building after I had gotten a room there, and I had thought to myself how amusingly inappropriate the name was.

An online version of this piece as it appears in print can be seen here.