OF DYING DOCTORS AND UNGRATEFULNESS

‘Kam zalem, voiz melo’ is perhaps one of the most well-known of Konkani aphorisms. Its popularity might lie in the fact that this maxim is used to describe the ungratefulness of those who have received favors. But if one looks closely at the saying, one would realize that in itself the aphorism means nothing. Such idiomatic expressions have a meaning that is handed-down to us, but it can also be the case that over time new meanings get attached to them. While considering the original or attached meanings, I would like to think differently about wit and wisdom that is handed down to us.

There are two aspects of this aphorism that I would like to discuss. The first is its protagonist: the voiz. A quick search revealed that the word in fact has origins in the Turkish language. Though in its original Turkish the word means a preacher and one who gives sermons, in Konkani the term is always used for someone who offers medical cures. In fact, if one consults old dictionaries such as that of Sebastião Rudolpho Dalgado (1905), the Konkani synonym of the Portuguese médico is variously given as voiz, vaidya, and even hakim. Rather than being a native or indigenous term, the word voiz apparently comes through Islamicate influences. This is not surprising as vast areas of South Asia – including Goa – have immense influences from the Islamicate worlds.

The voiz could be a doctor with a medical degree, trained in Western medicine, or he could be a practitioner of herbal remedies or zhadpalyacho voiz, as Dalgado notes in his dictionary. Further, a woman could also be a practitioner of herbal remedies and was appropriately known as a voizinn. In fact, being a voiz/voizinn is regarded as one of Goa’s traditional occupations. As such, what this aphorism does is to recognize the importance of cure-work. With or without formal medical training, the aphorism recognizes the voiz as an important institution in the Goan landscape. However, it can be also pointed out that while it recognizes the value of cure-work, the aphorism clearly privileges the voiz alone, and not the voizinn.

This brings me to the second aspect of the aphorism. While cure-work is recognized, many other types of work and equally important forms of labor are not accorded the same sort of privilege as the voiz. This is also a comment on how Goan society treats the importance of labor, and the inadequate remuneration that such forms of labor receive. Why is it that only the voiz is at the receiving end of alleged ungratefulness? If at all any voiz and voizinn will be at the receiving end of ungratefulness, then it has to be the traditional practitioners from the bahujan classes who have to also battle other forms of oppression, for the Western medicine-trained voiz was invariably of the elite classes right from the colonial times.

 It would be obvious to anyone who has been even marginally familiar with the history, economics, and sociology of Goa that it has actually been the working-classes (cutting across castes), or the vauraddi masses, that have been at the receiving end of so many instances of ‘ungratefulness’ from those who wield power. For instance, the bhatkar-mundkar land relations were never a bed of roses for the laboring tenant. The laboring classes hardly got a share of whatever little economic development was initiated towards the end of Portuguese colonialism by the Portuguese state. New research, such as that of Raghuraman Trichur in Refiguring Goa (2013), on the Goan economy in the colonial and post-colonial times has revealed that this trend has not altered much in post-colonial Goa.

That much of what Goa is today is due to the labor of its working class is expressed in the song Auraddi from the hit Konkani film of yesteryears Nirmonn (1966): “Pul te bandleai kunnem – Auraddeanim/Min ustilam kunnem – Auraddeanim/Ranamchim xar keleaim – Auraddeanim/Gaum sudraileai – Auraddeanim” (Who built the bridges – the workers/Who dug the mines – the workers/Who turned forests into cities – the workers/Who transformed the surroundings – the workers). Granted that the video accompanying this song only shows laborers smiling from ear-to-ear and actually enjoying the back-breaking labor, or, in other words, the film creates a romanticization of back-breaking labor. Though I would like to argue that this romanticization is produced by the imagination of the elites, the song does make a very important claim of giving due credit to those who built or made Goa through their labor. What the song does not tell you is how this back-breaking labor has not been appropriately and adequately compensated throughout the recent history of Goa.

So, if we look at the historical and sociological contexts of ‘Kam zalem, voiz melo’, then it surely seems like the voiz is not the only person to be at the receiving end of ingratitude. Certainly not the voiz with a medical degree, with the financial and social means at his disposal to gain a higher education, whether in Goa or abroad. I am sure there were many women cure-workers and people who provide other forms of labor have not received their due share of recognition and remuneration. So why would we collectively think that it was the voiz who was at the receiving end of ungratefulness? Hidden within the well known meaning of the aphorism, is there also a recognition that many other types of wokers or vauraddi have been at the receiving end of ungratefulness? If indeed this is the case then is this Konkani aphorism also conveying a clever irony?

Why the voiz dies, I am afraid, will remain a mystery. But thinking about such maxims and aphorisms could enable us to think about Goan society a little differently. Thus, we as a society would need an inventiveness of language or new aphorisms. Perhaps, now we need to occasionally slip into our conversation kam zalem, vauraddi mele. 

(First published in  O Heraldo, dt: 24 June, 2015)

USUAL SUSPECTS: GOAN CATHOLICS AND THEIR MARGINALIZATION

As in my previous column, this column too is a reference to the Uday Bhembre-Radharao Gracias debate that was carried in the pages of O Herald, about a month ago. While the previous column focused largely on the comments that Bhembre had made, this column would like to explore Gracias’ suggestion – that of the marginalization of Catholics in the public sphere of Goa. Gracias had suggested that this marginalization was acutely visible if one focused on the manner in which the nagri scripted Konkani held hegemony in Goa.

Focusing on the issue of the Roman-nagri script, one can also look at the role that an activist like Bhembre played in denying due recognition to the Roman script. Although, this column would focus on the views of Bhembre on Roman script, it must be noted that he is not the only person to hold such views. Indeed, such views are representative of a group of people holding power and hegemony in Goa. On a broad level, what is one of the most fundamental objections to the Roman script by the nagri lobby? It is this that the Roman script came in the wake of Portuguese colonialism; ergo it is a foreign script. As such it is not good enough to represent the ‘authentic’ culture of Goa. There were several other arguments that were made against the Roman script – that the literary productions in the Roman script lacked standard; that nagri script is better suited for Konkani as it is an Indian script; and also that the demand for the recognition of the Roman script is downright anti-national.

In all of this tamasha, over a number of years what was not said out loud was how in the denigration of the Roman script, the Catholics in Goa were denigrated as well. The people against whom this vitriol was directed were largely confined to the working-class, bahujan Catholic masses. This affects the bahujan Catholics more than anyone else for the reason that upper-caste Catholics can assert their brahmin privilege against the vitriolic attacks. The denial of the recognition of the Roman script therefore means the denial of recognition of the culture of the Catholic masses in Goa.

In recent years, an activist like Bhembre can be said to be the main protagonist arguing for the denial of the recognition of the Roman script. Reference can be made to a letter that Bhembre addressed to all Cabinet Ministers back in 2006. Through the text of this letter (archived on Goanet), we learn that the Cabinet was considering a change in the Official Language Act, 1987. In his capacity as the chairman of Vichar Vibhag, a think tank of the Congress in Goa, Bhembre was clear that the Official Language Act need not be changed to include the Roman script.

A year earlier, in October 2005, Bhembre was invited to speak at the Xavier Centre for Historical Research. He spoke on the topic ‘Road Map for the Standardisation and Development of the Konknni Language’. The main argument he made was that all Konkani speakers should unite under the nagri script. In other words, one had to give up producing in the Roman, Kannada, Malayalam, and Perso-Arabic scripts solely in favor of the nagri script. One can see the connection between Bhembre’s call for a standardization of Konkani under the nagri script, and his initiative as chairman of the Vichar Vibhag to exclude the Roman script from the Official Language Act, 1987. What should be stated clearly is that such efforts and attempts by activists like Bhembre are designed to exclude communities from political power and influence. In this case this exclusion is not simply faced by the bahujan Catholics alone, but also by the Hindu bahujan samaj. Many activists of the Hindu bahujan samaj view the imposition of the nagri script – and the unity that is sought under the umbrella of Konkani – as an attempt by the dominant castes in Goa to assert control over the rest. Thus, they see Marathi as the language around which they should mobilize against brahmanical hegemony, while also recognizing the validity of Konkani in the Roman script.

Uday Bhembre seen with Pundalik Naik and Shashikala Kakodkar

As stated earlier, Bhembre’s views are representative of many people that occupy positions of power and privilege, and those who try their best to influence cultural, linguistic and educational policies in Goa. We can also use the example of the Medium of Instruction (MoI) controversy in recent years. The demand for English as a MoI was erroneously seen as a demand solely of the Catholics of Goa. The familiar accusations of being disloyal and anti-national were hurled at the Goan Catholics. Not surprisingly, the group that was vociferously opposing this demand were the same people who refused to grant parity to the Roman script with the nagri one. But during the time of the MoI controversy, the activists who came under the banner of the Bharati Bhaso Suraksha Manch, had a decent support from a section of the Hindu bahujan samaj and those who were espousing the cause of the Marathi language in Goa.

Irrespective of whether the Hindu bahujan groups align or not with upper-caste interests in Goa, Catholic assertion – particularly the bahujan Catholic assertion – in the public sphere is always met with vitriolic opposition. Be it the demand for the recognition of the Roman script when Catholics were represented as agents of the Portuguese; or when the demand for English as MoI was seen as a conspiracy hatched by disloyal Catholics against Indian culture; or the more recent suggestion that Catholics are responsible for the misrepresentation and distortion of historical facts regarding the Opinion Poll. Through this vitriolic opposition and violent labeling of the Catholic assertion, any legitimacy that Catholics can claim in the Goan public sphere gets taken away from them. Also important to note here is how the Catholics who were supporting anti-merger in the run up to the Opinion Poll in 1967 were considered to be breeding anti-national and fifth-columnist tendencies, chiefly by the then Defense Minister, Y. B. Chavan (see Rajan Narayan and Sharon D’Cruz, Triumph of Secularism: Battle of the Opinion Poll in Goa).

Thus, one can see that if we take seriously the claim that Catholics have been marginalized in the Goan public sphere, one can see that in the most recent history Catholics have experienced a series of denials of their legitimate place in the public sphere. Rather than worrying much about the Goan identity, one needs to first come to terms with the history of denials and think of ways to undo them.

(First published in  O Heraldo, dt: 10 June, 2015)

COLONIZING GOA: THE INVASION OF LOCAL, NATIONAL, AND INTERNATIONAL BHATKARS

by DALE LUIS MENEZES, ALBERTINA ALMEIDA, JASON KEITH FERNANDES, AMITA KANEKAR

Goa is constantly framed as the holiday capital of India. However, there is a good amount of violence that underwrites this project of providing fun. The recent incidents in Tiracol, a village in the northern-most tip of the state, highlight this clearly. Sometime around the midnight of 14 May, the residents of the village were awakened by the arrival of men and machinery hired by M/s Leading Hotels Pvt. Ltd., a five-star hotel company, who went on to bulldoze a large part of the orchard lands of the village as part of their plan to build a PGA standard golf course and resort. The villagers have been strongly opposing this project for the last several years, with the result that the project has now been virtually stayed by the courts; Leading Hotels’ response to this legal and popular opposition was to sneak their men and machinery in at the dead of night, protected by fifty-odd bouncers.

Work was halted only when the vigilant villagers alerted the police. However, when local reporters reached the scene, the bouncers were still there. Diana Fernandes, a journalist writing for O Heraldo (16 May, 2015), reported that the area was still swarming with twenty-odd musclemen the next day.

This instance of violent land grab is not confined to the village of Tiracol. In fact, as a result of the boom in mining, real estate, and tourism industries in Goa, it has become a trend over the last couple of decades. In most cases, the chief victims are agricultural tenants who tilled the land belonging to landlords, and mundkars living on this land, with various obligations towards its upkeep. The problem of land-grab in Goa needs to be understood through the manner in which the existing feudal land relations of Goa – the relation between the mundkars and agricultural tenants (henceforth tenants), and the bhatkar (landlord) – have been supplemented by the feudal-like powers of global capital that works in alliance with the feudal lords. Additionally, we also suggest that the existing sorry state of affairs that Goa finds itself in, due to excesses of ‘development’ in the real estate market and other industries that gobble huge chunks of land, can only be correctly understood, and effectively addressed, if one approaches the issue from the perspective of the tenants and their experiences .

In Goa, land was traditionally appropriated and tightly controlled by the bhatkars. In addition to being a class, these bhatkars were also upper-caste. The caste equation is important as the bhatkars could be of any religious background, but were invariably from the upper-castes. Relief to the mundkars and tenants came in the form of the Goa Agricultural Tenancy Act, 1964 and the Goa Mundkar Act, 1975, but this relief was eventually thwarted by a new and developing economic system that no longer made it economically viable to cultivate land and made it seem more alluring to sell land to the highest bidder and share the spoils, albeit disproportionately between the bhatkar and the tenants.

But Tiracol was different. The bhatkarial rights were held by the Khalap family, said to be a branch of the Deshprabhu family who still are the bhatkars of most of Pernem taluka. The bhatkar here was an absentee one who had long broken contact with the village, to the extent of not collecting either mundkarial services or tenant revenues. This, coupled with the relative homogeneity of the tenant population – a small village of about 50 Catholic households living off cashew orchards, fishing and the production of urrack and feni, along with some rice farming and coconut plantations – made the village a relatively egalitarian and developing space where caste hierarchy was not strongly evident and where many were making the socio-economic shift from tenants to entrepreneurs and workers in the modern economy.

Hence it is not surprising that the proposed golf course project by M/s Leading Hotels, which first hit the news in 2007-08, was vehemently opposed by the St. Anthony Tenant and Mundkar Association (SATMA) of Tiracol. It is also interesting, though again not surprising, that the local spokesperson of Leading Hotels, Gerson Rebelo, viewed the company that he represents as a bhatkar: “The land belongs to us, we are…the bhatkars in the traditional sense, and whatever claims that are there on the land will be settled in the appropriate fora. We have every permission in place”. Goa’s tenancy law echoes this outlook where it is clear that if a land parcel, which includes mundkars and agricultural tenants, is sold, then the purchaser buys the land with the obligations to comply with the provisions of the mundkar and agricultural tenancy laws. Normally, the practice is that when a bhatkar sells that land, the purchaser simultaneously settles the claims of existing tenants, creating in this process an unencumbered right to the property. But what the law, as well as the Leading Hotels’ spokesperson, hides is the fact that the clout of the new bhatkar in the form of a big powerful corporate entity makes it possible for both money and muscle to be flexed to take over physical possession of the land.

It is pertinent to note here that M/s Leading Hotels is a subsidiary of Asian Hotels (North) Ltd. and according to the Director’s Report of the latter, the company holds 100% equity as well as preference capital in Fineline Hospitality Pvt. Ltd., Mauritius (FHCPL). For its part, FHCPL is a significant player in the global tourism economy and holds substantial equity stakes in many other companies worldwide, including in the company which has a substantial stake in Leading Hotels. One can clearly see the power and reach of global capital that comes to bear on, or invade if you like, Tiracol.

As has been pointed out, the bhatkar of the village of Tiracol was absent in the years subsequent to the integration of Goa into India, giving the tenants the space with which to craft a relatively egalitarian order and use the benefits of quasi-land ownership to become small-time agricultural entrepreneurs. But the bhatkar made a comeback, to make a killing off the land. He sold the rights to the land to M/s Leading Hotels in 2007. Since SATMA questioned the legality of the sale, because the existence of the tenants was not acknowledged and recognized, M/s Leading Hotels began to approach individual village households to buy them off; about ten families agreed to sell at varying rates, from Rs 120 per square metre, then Rs 200, and finally Rs 500, showing how life-sustaining resources can be robbed from villagers for a pittance because of their ignorance. It also shows the complete failure of the Goan government to protect villagers, even while it boasts of its support to the farm economy – and thus its tacit support to the land-grab. ‘Tacit’, however, may be too obtuse a word, given the fact that newspaper reports of over a year ago claimed that the state government had actually planned this golf project under the Central Government’s ‘Large Revenue Generating Scheme’, in which a state subsidy of up to Rs 50 crore can be given!

Despite everything, however, the project was unable to take off for procedural and infrastructural reasons. But things seem to have changed with Modi’s rise to power at the centre. The project obtained environmental clearance despite the earlier assurances by Environment Minister Alina Saldanha to the contrary. Although the villagers went to court against the clearance and, with the Goa Foundation, obtained a stay on further felling of tress, M/s Leading Hotels apparently felt emboldened enough to try to terrorize their way into taking over the land and destroying the orchards there.

While the issue of Tiracol was thus on the boil, Goan newspapers also reported the opposition of villagers to a proposed Marina project in Sancoale, close to the port town of Vasco. The project proposal had been forwarded by the Investment Promotion and Facilitation Board to the panchayat of the village of Sancoale. The company intending to develop this marina is M/s Yacht Heaven (Pvt) Ltd, registered in the name of Umaji Vishwasrao Chowgule and Arjun Ashok Chowgule. The Chowgules, as is widely known in Goa, made their fortunes first-and-foremost through mining operations. The close links that many Goan real estate companies have with the mining industry is important to note, as this is how economic, political, and social capital already in possession of such class and caste elites, get transformed within the real estate industry, thus pushing tenants out of their lands.

In this context, it was interesting to note the editorial in O Heraldo (19 May, 2015), which talked about the popular opposition to such mega projects, taking two of the most recent examples, the blatant goondaism at Tiracol and the Marina project at Sancoale, as cases in point. The editorial revealed how the Investment Promotion and Facilitation Board (IPFB), which has the current Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar as its chairman, would try to circumvent the locals as well as government bodies like the Pollution Control Board and the State Bio-Diversity Board. One of the members of the IPFB in a private conversation revealed to the editor of O Heraldo that since the “IP[F]B has given its approval, the project proponents can go to the pollution board and tell them to better give permission since the IP[F]B has the CM [Laxmikant Parsekar] as its chairman”. The editorial further notes that this “shows the mindset of a body made to clear projects at a rapid pace to meet the very ambitious investment target of the government”. What we can see here is how a narrowly framed conception of ‘development’ is being used by the Goan government in collusion with corporates (bhatkars of a different kind) to push the people of Goa off their land.

So, what we see is that, although the mundkar and agricultural population in Goa is not able to forge alliances with similar beleaguered communities across India and the world, more bhatkars – in the form of national and global capitalists – are getting added to the old ones in Goa. These national and multi-national corporations have allied themselves with the local Goan bhatkars and thus combine modern as well as traditional power to drive out the mundkars and the agricultural tenants from their ancestral homes and the lands that they have long tended.

This is the process by which Goa gets colonized, one mega-project at a time.

First published in DNA (web) on 31 May, 2015, here.