The commemoration of the East India Company’s
victory against the Peshwas at Bhima Koregaon, and the subsequent violence that was
witnessed, provides some pointers to understand
Goan history. In recent times, those lakhs of Dalits who congregate at Bhima
Koregaon to pay their respects to the fallen warriors have been termed as
“anti-nationals” by the Hindu right. The ostensible logic of the Hindu right is
that commemorations such as those at Bhima Koregaon signify the celebration of ‘foreign’
victory over ‘Indian’ forces. We are thus presented with a history that appears
to contain a clear divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The ‘us’ here is a unified
political and cultural community called India, and the ‘them’ being the foreign
rulers who did not have their origins in India.
But such logic is not just endemic within the
thinking of the right. Even secular liberal nationalism has successfully attempted
to project a clear us-and-them divide in the subcontinent’s past. New research
in history is increasingly demonstrating that this is not the case. Indeed, the
past witnessed myriad and complex forms of power struggles that do not fit into
the simple ‘us’ versus ‘them’ binary. The commonly known and freely circulating
facts about Goan history are a good place to start understanding these complex
power struggles.
It is well-known that Portuguese sovereignty, which
started in 1510 could not have been successful without the help of native
elites. While the campaign of Afonso de Albuquerque is etched in the collective
memory of Goans due to the inclusion in school textbooks, the fact that native
elites like the trader Mhall Pai Vernekar and the naval commander Timoja who
helped Albuquerque with intelligence and forces is not interpreted as
collaborating with a foreign power. The issue here is not whether a power is
foreign or not, but the manner in which nationalist history writing chooses to interpret
certain facts. Thus, when elites join forces with foreign powers it is not regarded
as aiding colonial power or imposing foreign domination. But the same
nationalist history holds it against the subaltern sections if they align with
foreign powers.
The truth is that everybody, at some point or the
other, aligned with foreign powers in a complex hierarchy of political power. In
fact, ‘foreignness’ wasn’t defined according to modern notions of nationality. However,
it was always the elites who were the first to make alliances, and this is true
of both India and Goa. Because the history of European rule in South Asia is
also linked to colonial rule, the acknowledgment of this history of native or
local collaboration becomes all the more urgent if one is not to be misled by
naïve readings of history. In this context, we can turn to the writings of the
historian Ângela Barreto Xavier, based at the University of Lisbon who has
roots in Goa and also holds the J. H. da Cunha Rivara Chair for Visiting
Professors at the Goa University. Xavier
in her essay, “David contra Golias na Goa Seiscentista e Setecentista. Escrita
Identitária e Colonização Interna,” (Ler
História, no. 49, 2005) argues
that the contestation of local elites – the Brahmins and the Chardos – within
the political system of the Portuguese empire created “internal colonizers”.
Within the imperial Portuguese hierarchies, Xavier
argues that the local elites competed with each other for entry into such
prestigious occupations such as priesthood and military services in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The interesting bit about the local elites
was that while they were subject to the Portuguese imperial hierarchy, their
bid for power was also tempered by their internal caste differences, conversion
to Christianity notwithstanding. The result was that both the Brahmins and
Chardos constructed their identity in a particular way: on the one hand, arguing
that they were best suited to govern the lands on behalf of the Portuguese
Crown; and on the other, trying to defeat the caste interests of their rival
group(s). Thus, Catholic Brahmins would write texts that would claim nobility
for their lineage; in response, the Chardos wrote texts that countered this
view of the Brahmins, making a case for their eligibility to rule the territory
of Goa. Hindu Brahmins similarly took their sectarian differences to the
Portuguese Crown, asking the king to restrict the power of the rival sects.
The power games of the elites and their successful
bid for power in the Portuguese empire – whether through government and/or
military employment, entry into the ecclesiastical hierarchy, or maintaining
the control over temple management and property – created a group of people,
already elites before the coming of the Portuguese, aiding the process of
empire-building and colonization. Xavier suggests that such a political process
resulted in the native elites increasingly claiming the place of the
intermediary between the Portuguese Crown and officials and the subaltern
peoples of Goa.
Anjali Arondekar, another Goan scholar at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, talks about how activists of the Gomantak
Maratha Samaj in the nineteenth century mobilized themselves in
order to liberate this beleaguered community from upper-caste oppression.
One of the means that they used was to petition the Portuguese Governor to
intervene and alleviate their plight.
Whether all these alliances by different sections of
Goan society were successful or not is a story for another day. The
commemoration/celebration today is largely linked to groups that are
marginalized or oppressed in contemporary political setup. Hence, it is unwise
to take a moral high ground in this regards, largely because it enables a
misleading belief that there were stark differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the
past.
(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 17 January, 2018)
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