The Indira Gandhi National Center for
the Arts (IGNCA),
based at New Delhi has been documenting and studying Indian culture since 1985.
Recently, the IGNCA has embarked on an ambitious project of promoting the
endangered culture and traditions of various tribes in India. As part of this
initiative, the IGNCA has decided to establish three regional centers in Ranchi,
Jharkhand, Pondicherry, and in Goa. Sachchidanand Joshi, Member Secretary of
the IGNCA was quoted
in the press explaining the general objectives of the project, “We do not have
reliable database for various tribes including endangered tribes. These are
changing and someone needs to document the change”.
Though the objective of this project
seems to be oriented towards preserving marginalized groups and their
endangered traditions, IGNCA’s view of Goan culture, tradition, and history
seem to be lacking as far as Goans are concerned. In the first place, IGNCA
understands Goan culture as one that is “dying”.
An official from IGNCA was quoted in a prominent national daily, “…we have set
up our regional centre in Goa and signed an MoU with Ravindra Bhawan to launch
a massive hunt for the folklore artistes to take part in theatres, perform folk
dance, sing folk songs and play various musical instruments which have nothing
to do with Portuguese culture. The idea is to save the dying cultural heritage
of Goa by reviving and recording them”. In other words, the IGNCA has already
written the epitaph of a vibrant and living community and its culture.
Secondly, and perhaps more
problematically, the IGNCA posits Goan culture, especially that of rural and
Bahujan Goa, as being different from and untouched by Portuguese culture. To
assume that rural cultures exist without any external influences is to
essentialize them as cultures isolated from the rest. If they have been
isolated from the rest it is largely because these traditions were limited to a
particular caste or tribal group, and not part of the traditions of a wider and
diverse community.
This is not the first time that cultural
chauvinists – both from Goa and outside – have had a problem with Goa’s
different culture; different, that is, from what is seen as “mainstream” Indian
or Hindu culture. This Goan difference is not simply confined to the Christians
of Goa. Indeed, the temple architecture until very recently borrowed elements
from Renaissance architecture as well as from Islamicate art. That the IGNCA is
today leading this movement of reform or purification is not surprising given
that one of the aims of the Centre is to “evolve models of research programmes
and arts administrations more portinent [pertinent] to the Indian ethos”.
India’s caste system ensures that tribal
and Dalitbahujan communities remain backwards. Preserving cultural practices
mired in casteist and discriminatory social relations could also mean that
these people remain marginalized. Thus, the whole idea of preserving cultural
practices – of creating essentially happy museumized
cultures – necessarily must address the issue of how these very same practices allow
for discrimination to persist.
And it is not like all kinds of Goan
cultural traditions have not received the support and encouragement of state
machinery – whether of the colonial or of the nation-state. And each of these
states has promoted these cultural traditions for their own selfish ends. For
instance, the late Portuguese colonial state, around the 1940s and 1950s, was
responsible for the identification
and promotion of several folk traditions from Goa –
such as the ghodde-moddnni and dangar dances – as authentic Goan folk
traditions. Ironically, this is the precise moment when many of folk traditions
found in Goa come to be seen as Goan for the first time ever.
With Indian rule from 1961, the Indian
and Goan government promoted many of these folkloric traditions for generating
income from tourism from the 1970s. And now the present government with its
narrow understanding of Indian and Goan culture seems to be promoting a ‘Goan
culture’ or parts of Goan culture in order to purify the same from Portuguese
influences.
So where does this leave Goan culture in
contemporary times? Probably in a bad place because new efforts to define (or
re-define) Goan culture possibly would rob it of its diversity and the various
cultural influences in its history. For instance, if we say that we have to rid
Goa of its Portuguese influences then an art form like the mando would
have to disappear. Goa will be poorer because a classic mando like Adeus Korcho
Vellu Pavlo, composed
by Torquato de Figuereido in 1905, will no longer be part of its cultural
heritage. One could even say that tiatr, owing its origins to western
opera can also be termed as foreign or un-Indian. The list, perhaps, will be
quite long if we hold on to this thinking of ‘cultural purity’.
Cultural purists in India and Goa miss a
crucial point: the intervention of the Portuguese and the cultural practices
that evolved in this long period are crucial in the creation of Goa or how Goa
developed through time. There is no Goa outside of this history of myriad
cultural influences converging to form its cultural characters, beginning from
the time of the Estado da Índia. In a similar way it is also important
to remember that many traditions fundamental to Indian culture, such as in
food, developed as a result of Portuguese commercial policies. Chilies and
potatoes, for instance, reached the shores of the Indian subcontinent some five
centuries ago. Stated in a different way, there is no pure Goan culture –
whether Portuguese or Indian.
To not recognize this fact would only
mean that we will be hastening the process of fabricating our own history and
promoting a general amnesia regarding the same.
(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 25 October, 2017)
