Adopting a
characteristically Marxist approach to study and theorize about Goan society
and history, the US-based academic Raghuraman S. Trichur in his book Refiguring Goa: From a Trading Post to Tourism Destination, tries to fill in a void where academic studies about
Goa were and are rarely theorized in a rigorous manner. Trichur’s short study
comes as a critical intervention in the scholarly and academic sphere of Goa,
which one can argue, has progressed only sluggishly. Against the backdrop of
the issue of whether or not the Goa University had failed to protect the
interests of its researchers which had cropped up a couple of months ago,
Trichur’s work merit a serious reflection.
If Trichur views
his work as throwing in “a proverbial spanner in the wheel of Goan studies”, then
the question of how debates and representations of Goa have occurred until now,
is a pertinent one to ask. Of the many issues that Trichur has undertaken, I
would like to limit the focus to discuss how Goa gets represented. From a
reading of Trichur’s book as well as an engagement with recent Goan writing, it
emerges that two main conceptual entities have thus far been used to represent
Goa, and even now continue to be deployed in this task. One is the Goa Dourada (i.e. Goa that is
essentially Portuguese and Catholic) and Goa
Indica (i.e. Goa that is essentially Indian and Hindu), and the bhatkar-mundkar (landlord-tenant) land
relations paradigms. Trichur’s study in a crucial way plots a conflict between
these conceptual paradigms, no doubt owing to the fact that his analysis is
grounded in historical materialism.
Simply put,
historical materialism is a set of theoretical assumptions that the economic
production determines the intellectual and political history of a particular
epoch. Limitations notwithstanding, such an approach or analysis is useful as
now the thrust is to explain Goa; for
very often, what happens is that we describe
Goa (such as Goa is oh-so-beautiful, its mountains, beaches etc.) with very
little done as far as having a nuanced understanding of the different facets of
Goan economy and society. If one tries to explain the emergence and development
of the essential components of Goan society, as Trichur does, then one can see
how Goan society, over the centuries, has been hammered on the anvil of
conflict.
By focusing on
this conflict and reflecting on it deeply, one can suggest, that the paradigms
of Goa Dourada, Goa Indica, and the bhatkar-mundkar
land relations come together in debating and representing Goa. To understand
these paradigms is crucial as these are “class-based ideologies”, as Trichur
asserts. To follow this particular strand in Refiguring Goa, these conflicting caste- and class-based paradigms
and ideologies need a site or location on which the conflict or multiples
conflicts can be played out. Trichur looks at trade, agriculture, and tourism
as sites that engender conflict. For our purposes, we shall just look at tourism.
Trichur argues that much of the tourism-related services are provided by the
peasant households, who had to make a shift from agrarian activities owing to
the declining productivity of agriculture in the coastal areas.
Tourism is an
important site over here, as it can be clearly seen how the different paradigms
of Goa Dourada, Goa Indica, and the bhatkar-mundkar
land relations operate. Trichur argues that it was through tourism that Goa
was in reality incorporated into India. This was done by constructing a
Southern European and Catholic image for Goa, while simultaneously maintaining
an essential Indian-ness and an idea of primordial ties with India. It is
through tourism-related activities that the bhatkars
and mundkars can also be viewed
as coming in conflict with each other, and not just due to conflicts pertaining
to the ownership of land.
Take for
instance, the case of sossegado or susegad, the USP of Goa not just in
tourism brochures but also in the countless features about Goa in national and
international newsmagazines. Susegad was
essentially a lifestyle and ethos of the Catholic landed elite, which as
Trichur mentions, “symbolize[d] [the] acceptance of and submission to the
Portuguese colonial order”. The susegad lifestyle
of the landed elites was made possible essentially because the bhatkar could extract labour out of his mundkar. With the emergence of Goa as a
tourist destination in the 1970s, the peasant or mundkar households entered into the hospitality business – though
of the petty kind. This “enabled them [the mundkars]
to imitate the lifestyle of the landed elite of the colonial period, who
frequently played host to colonial administrators and other foreign visitors”.
Thus, in this case, the extension of hospitality – chiefly to westerners – operates
as a “status enhancing mechanism” for the peasant and kharvi (fisherfolk) population of coastal Goa.
Due to the
assumptions of historical materialism, Trichur, in his study is not much
concerned with the symbolic aspect of the operation of the abovementioned
paradigms and ideologies. Perhaps, it is here that a Marxist perspective is
limiting, as within the Goan society, many aspire to appropriate the figure of
the bhatkar along with the trappings
of his power. Although there has been and will always be a conflict between the
bhatkars and the mundkars, the actual workings of this conflict are much more
complex, than can be accommodated within historical materialism. Elsewhere, I
have spoken about this longing that the bhatkars
and mundkars have for the ‘good
old days’, which gets expressed in the form of a ‘lament’. I call this the
‘Lament for Bhatkarponn’.
Though there are
limitations, Trichur’s work can be used to constitute a better understanding of
Goa. To look at how Goa Dourada, Goa Indica, and particularly the bhatkar-mundkar land relations operate within
the Goan intellectual framework, is to reach at the very heart of what Goa
really is. Suddenly, Goa emerges as a complex intellectual and political space.
Suddenly, Goa opens up possibilities.
(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 28 May, 2014)
