"Goa, the Tropical Lusosphere, or (De)Constructing Portugeseness Elsewhere" in eTROPIC (July 2023)

Signs of the Portuguese

It had not been the first time that Chief Minister Pramod Sawant had called attention to what he deemed the deleterious effects of colonialism in Goa. One of the longest held European colonies in the world, Goa was under the Portuguese from 1510 to 1961; the region’s violent annexation by post-British India may have ousted the Portuguese but also circumvented and denied Goan self-emancipation, resulting in an ongoing colonialism. Strikingly, in 2021, Sawant declared that it was necessary to rebuild temples allegedly destroyed by the Portuguese, so as to “preserve Hindu Sanskriti and Mandir Sanskriti (Hindu culture and temple culture)” (Express New Service, 2021, par. 6). Yet, a year later, despite exhortations by Sawant’s administration to “citizens, NGOs, and historians” to provide evidence of the destruction of temples so they could be reconstructed, Goa’s Department of Archaeology reported that none had been forthcoming (Kamat, 2022, pars. 3-5). Not to be undone by this lack of corroboration, this year, Sawant stepped up his belated anticolonial rhetoric. Again linking his retributive aspirations to his belief that the colonizers had destroyed Hindu temples, the politician declared at a public event that 60 years after their departure, “the time had come to wipe out signs of the Portuguese” in totality (TNN, 2023, pars. 1-2).

As someone with a Portuguese name from a Goan family, this gives me pause. Lusophonic familial appellations mark Goans of Catholic heritage, who are a minority.  The Chief Minister’s statement is chilling, because there is no mistaking what the postcolonial remnant “signs of the Portuguese” are: it is us. In what follows, I seek to demonstrate the political purpose of constructing Goan Catholic identity as “other” in the contemporary moment while also considering how Portugueseness, as it develops beyond the metropole and in the tropical lusosphere, is an explicitly Goan identity.

The Crossing by R. Benedito Ferrão, 2023.

 

The Postcolonial Other

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to which Sawant and his administration belong, is also the one currently at the helm of the Indian nation-state. Presently run by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the party’s Hindu-supremacist and right-wing authoritarian fundamentalist (or Hindutva) praxis has escalated in the first decades of the 21^st century across India (Kalhan, 2023, 379). Resolved to establish a Hindu Rashtra (or state) in India (which already has a Hindu-majority population), India’s Hindu right has been supported financially by the diaspora (Kalhan, 2023, 338). In the meanwhile, contemporary postcolonial India, which is the world’s largest democracy ironically, has seen a rise in the persecution of minorities, including (but not limited to) Muslims, Dalits, members of tribal communities, and Christians (Hassan 2023). These subjects are regarded as impediments to the making of the Hindu Rashtra because of their identitarian divergence. As Saba Mahmood articulates it, minorities are those whose “difference (religious, racial, ethnic) poses an incipient threat to the identity of the nation that is grounded in the religious, linguistic, and cultural norms of the majority” (2015, 32).

Aligning himself with his party’s national politics around the creation of a Hindu Rashtra by advocating for “Hindu Sanskriti and Mandir Sanskriti (Hindu culture and temple culture),” Sawant’s crusade against remainders of colonial history execrates Goan Catholics, defined as they are by their Portuguese names. Simultaneously, such malignment of minorities has as much to do with religious chauvinism as it does with statecraft (or, perhaps, the deflection of its actual practice). As Vivek Menezes apprehends, the bogeyman of the Portuguese past is a “[distraction] in [Goa,] India’s smallest state, where governance has effectively collapsed ... Unemployment crested to nearly 17% in January [2023], and … remains double the rate of the rest of the country” (2023, par. 1). Evidently, the conflation of Iberian colonialism and Catholic identity in Goa functions as a convenient scapegoat. When Goan Catholicism is simply viewed as a product of Portuguese colonialism, one in which early converts are thought to have expressed no agency or choice, then Goan Catholics who continue to be of the faith postcolonially are easily construed as, both, colonial remnants (even apologists) and the other to a once-secular state that now hurtles towards exclusionary religious monolithicism.

Portugueseness in the Tropics, or Goan if in Goa

Although the roots of Catholicism in Goa may be pinned to the arrival of the Portuguese in South Asia a half-millennium ago, the religion has developed into a distinct regional form, one akin to, yet cleaved from, its Iberian likeness. Nowhere is this more tangible than in the construction of early churches in Goa by Goans. Builders of these churches imbibed European aesthetics from the sixteenth century on but remade them to employ locally sourced materials and for the edifices to endure tropical climatic conditions (Kandolkar, 2021). Moreover, such architectural developments were not solely discernable in Catholic church design, as domesticated European Renaissance influences even featured in Goa’s Brahmanical temple forms in the seventeenth century (Kanekar, 2018, 254). One wonders what Sawant might make of these signs of Portugueseness. In the case of churches, their displays of Goan domestications and reworkings of European built forms serve as indices of the localization of the faith and the instantiation of new ideas. Not just simulacra of Portuguese culture, they exist as their own manifestations of Goan ingenuity and agency within a colonial milieu. To state this differently, nothing in Goa, even if inspired by or contributed to by Portuguese colonialism, is Portuguese. In its tropical lusopheric form, it was and always will be Goan.

References

Express News Service. (2021, December 22). “Goa CM Pramod Sawant: Temples Destroyed by Portuguese Need to be Rebuilt to Preserve Hindu Culture.” The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/goa/goa-temples-destroyed-portugese-hindu-culture-pramod-sawant-7684509/

Hassan, Tirana. (2023). “World Report 2023: India.” Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/india

Kalhan, A. (2023). Tipping Point: A Short Political History of India. Routledge.

Kandolkar, V. P. (2021). “Rain in the Basilica: Protecting Goa’s Bom Jesus from the Ravages of Climate Change.” ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 20(2), 95–113. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3814

Kanekar, A. (2018). “The Politics of Renovation: The Disappearing Architecture of Goa’s Brahmanical Temples.” In Joaquim Rodrigues dos Santos (Ed.), Preserving Transcultural Heritage: Your Way or My Way? Questions on Authenticity, Identity and Patrimonial Proceedings in the Safeguarding of Architectural Heritage Created in the Meetings of Cultures (pp. 253-263). Caleidoscópio

Mahmood, Saba. (2015). Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton University Press

Menezes, V. (2023, June 25). “Hidden Truths.” O Heraldo. https://www.heraldgoa.in/Edit/By-invitation/Hidden-Truths/206619

Shweta, K. (2022, December 6). “There’s Still no Data or Inputs on Temples Destroyed during the Portuguese Regime.” O Heraldo. https://www.heraldgoa.in/Goa/There%E2%80%99s-still-no-data-or-inputs-on-temples-destroyed-during-the-Portuguese-regime/197734

TNN. (2023, June 8). “Time to Wipe out Goa’s Portuguese Signs: CM Pramod Sawant.” The Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/time-to-wipe-out-goas-portuguese-signs-cm-pramod-sawant/articleshow/100832346.cms?from=mdr

From eTropic: Decolonizing the Tropics.

"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.