THE CASUAL CASTEISM OF THE HOMELESS COSMOPOLITAN

A curious figure keeps showing up in Goa (and also in certain liberal pockets of the Northeast): the homeless cosmopolitan. You have come across them many times. They have hopped between metros all their lives, enjoyed cushy middle-class lives, studied in the UK or US, floated through well-upholstered childhoods, and now, usually in their late twenties or thirties, decide it’s time to “move” somewhere decent: Goa.

They are not really homeless. They just don’t want to live in most parts of India. Once here, they appoint themselves brokers of culture (or real estate) and good taste. Some arrive as artists, filmmakers, designers (“Goa-based” is a brand not a description); others simply log in to their corporate jobs and ‘work from home’. They are hyper-mobile, hyper-credentialed, and cushioned by inherited privilege. Yet the talent they bring and the cultural authority they assume is questionable to say the least.

Take the new wave of homeless cosmopolitan “artists” who descend on Goa. Scroll through their exhibitions, installations, residencies, and you start to wonder: where is the depth, meaning, and beauty in their art? (I am sure one of them will lecture me about ‘art’—good for them!).

Before I talk about the casual casteism of the homeless cosmopolitan, let me admit something: I feel a certain sympathy for them. I have lived in eight different cities in the last fifteen years. I consider three of them, Washington DC, Lisbon, and Doha, as places like Goa or my home. These travels have impressed upon me the possibility of rootedness or the act of place-making that does not come from entitlement. So I know the joy of finding your home and the heartache of not belonging. I understand that uprooted through childhood, of moving from one city to another, shifting schools, never quite belonging leaves behind crushing emptiness. To not have a home to return to, a place that anchors you no matter how far you travel, is a genuine psychological wound. I get that. I don’t mock it.

But this is India and casteism has to pop up everywhere. The truth is that most of these wanderers can relocate to Goa because they carry caste capital in their deliberately modest tote bags. Their mobility is not magical, it is the gift of Indian society. They are privileged but strangely unaware of the means that facilitate their mobility in the first place. They want to hide this privilege by saying they cannot belong anywhere largely because the locals don’t accept them.

And here lies the rub: despite all the talk of cosmopolitanism, global citizenship, worldliness, art, anti-casteism, the homeless cosmopolitan has rarely examined their own position. There is no soul-searching, no discomfort, no ethical pause, and certainly no examination of the conscience. Just a seamless, thoughtless, and entitled slide into Aldona, Moira, Assagao, and Siolim; those promised lands for outsider salvation.

What emerges from this is not explicit bigotry but something subtler, slipperier, and far more common: casual casteism. It is casteism of the hip and meritorious.

The outpourings of the homeless cosmopolitan are not new. For about two decades, I’ve watched the same script unfold: homeless cosmopolitans arrive in Goa and immediately style themselves as custodians of culture and good taste. They settle in, throw around words like “community,” “healing,” and “creative ecosystem,” and then, within months, begin lamenting that Goa has “gone to the dogs”: the internet is slow, the governance chaotic, and the locals are difficult. Or, as the notorious Dilliwali novelist, Deepti Kapoor, they bounce to some other exotic location.

Two decades of this cycle and no one seems to learn the obvious lesson: the problem is not Goa. The problem is you.

But say this aloud and immediately a familiar deflection appears: “But aren’t Goans also contributing to the problem? Aren’t Goans selling land? Aren’t Goans, especially Catholics, also casteist?”

Of course Goans, like any community, have internal contradictions and pressures. But the question here isn’t about Goans. The question is about you. And the moment the spotlight turns to your role, why the instinct to weasel out? Why the sudden high-falutin sociological analysis when all that’s being asked for is a moment of honesty?

There must be a reason why Goa is the preferred destination. It is certainly not the natural beauty, for you get that aplenty in Maharashtra and Kerala, for instance. The reason is something that only Goa offers: a respectful, decent, and free life, or at least the only chance of such a life in India. Freedom is what they seek, a feeling best captured by numerous Bollywood and South Indian films.

The truth is simple: the homeless cosmopolitan votes with their feet. There is no other state in mainland India that offers the freedoms and decency that Goa does, except perhaps a few pockets in the Northeast. Even Kerala, despite its high HDI numbers, is not good enough.

Yet, there is no effort to imbibe Goan culture. No attempt to change one’s heart and soul. The homeless cosmopolitan simply occupies Goan space and jacks up the prices of rent and real estate?

Many homeless cosmopolitans ironically cling tightly to the cultures they arrived with. They hold on to a cultural identity that is steeped in caste privilege. And that unexamined self manifests effortlessly through the everyday and casual casteism of the homeless cosmopolitan.

But is there a solution?

One option is brutally simple. You can vote with your feet one last time. Pack your bags and go elsewhere. Try improving that place instead of extracting from Goa while complaining about Goans. Perhaps you can turn your Delhis into the Goa of your dreams! (Those who want to “move” to Goa and open a café must reconsider or delay that decision).

Goans have lived, lost, thrived, and fought their battles for five centuries without you. Whatever our problems, we have figured out our ways of living, our internal negotiations—our convivências. Goans will be fine without your art, without your good taste, without your self-appointed cultural authority, without your money, and without your casual casteism.

But there is a second option. And it is harder. You can choose to stay and surrender to Goan culture.

Apart from reading Ambedkar to get rid of the intrinsic and casual casteism, a homeless cosmopolitan needs to understand what Goa is. Goan culture is not a vibe, a beach aesthetic, a curated dinner, tourism “beyond its beaches,” an escape from India, or a “creative community.” The social and intellectual culture of Goa is a historical formation shaped by two deep, intertwined streams over five hundred years: Roman Catholicism and a specific Iberian liberal tradition—this is what made the freedom so desperately desired by the homeless cosmopolitan.

With these resources, Goans turned themselves into a people who are open, joyous, and fiercely protective of the good life—not the luxury life, but the moral good life. These values were accessible to the high and the low. Through our history, we have never been defined by money, even the bhatcars never had enough of that. Goans are a people who respect leisure without making it a commodity, who value freedom without turning it into individualism, who treasure conviviality as a civic principle. “Susegad” is a philosophy of the common good.

Catholicism is not as an exotic religion at odds with Indian culture, but a lived moral community. It is the base that defines Goan culture, whether or not one professes that faith. Further, Goans practiced secularism and engaged with liberalism (think the Uniform Civil Code) almost a century before rudimentary municipal elections took place in British India to teach Indians how to become good liberal subjects. Goans were modern much before the rest of India. (I understand the Bhadralok might protest—good for them!).

Allow Goa to change you: your being, your soul, your whole life.

Otherwise that rootlessness, not your mobility, not your career, not your origin, will sustain your casual, unexamined, and so effortlessly reproduced casteism. There is a way out of being a homeless cosmopolitan, a person forever drifting, always extracting, and never belonging.