GOAN DIRECTORS ON ‘GOAN’ FILMS

Writing for the Open magazine in 2011, Ajit Duara lamented that “Goa…never had a reliable recorder of its history, at least in cinema.” Bollywood depictions, he further explained have been responsible – despite few good movies on Goa – for the lack of serious engagements with Goa’s history and culture. From the time such an assertion was made, it seems that the dearth of both filmmakers and serious engagements are gaps that are being slowly filled. However, it would be erroneous to think that before the present crop of filmmakers there were no films made about Goa and Goans. Indeed, the decades from the 1950s saw a few films like Amchem Noxib (1963, Our Fate) and Nirmonn (1966, Destiny) being produced, which today are considered as classics in Goan cinema.

And if there is a growing bunch of Goan filmmakers making unique movies that have a deep appeal amongst the Goan populace, what are the conceptual and intellectual issues that Goan directors face? In other words, what makes a film ‘Goan,’ assuming that there is a thing like a ‘Goan’ film? “Honesty,” emphasizes Bardroy Barretto, the director of the much-loved Nachom-ia Kumpasar (Let’s dance to the Rhythm). Barretto’s labor of love brought alive the jazz scene in Bombay, and the immense contribution of Goan musicians in fuelling that industry, including Bollywood music. Barretto feels that the cinematic language of Goan films is “trying to be Bollywood,” thereby suggesting that it needs to move in a different direction. He explains that the honesty in the story comes in the form of having “enough subtext of Goa” in the form of the level of detailing done by the filmmaker. By taking care in developing the character – such as the spoken language used in the dialogues – makes the film authentic to the culture, Barretto feels, for it is “only then that the film is worth for other audiences.”

“I don’t know if films can be constrained within regions,” says Dnyanesh Moghe, director of the film Digant (Boundless). Moghe is not interested in labels, it seems. He reasons that the problems that he depicts in his work – those of identity, freedom, the suppression of self-expression, and spiritual problems are universal. Like the title of his film, Moghe also sees himself as boundless: “I am a global citizen. I don’t believe in nationality, though I am an Indian.” Of course, Moghe does not deny the influence of Goa in the creative process. But he emphasizes that it is only incidental: “Stories come to me from my surrounding, which is Goa.”

Laxmikant Shetgaonkar, director of the critically acclaimed Paltadcho Munis (The Man Beyond the Bridge), feels very strongly that “language” is more important in understanding the categorization of films. “There is nothing called ‘Goan’ cinema,” he asserts, “there is either Marathi, Konkani, or Malayalam cinema.” Rajendra Talak feels that Goan cinema – or “regional films,” according to him – “highlights issues connected to Goa. They depict the culture of Goa.” All his three films Aleesha, Antarnaad, and O Maria focused on the problems of the mining industry, music practiced by two generations within a single family, and the property and land disputes respectively. In fact Dharmanand Vernekar, another Goan director feels the same that Goan films depict the issues that come along with “Goenkarponn – the Goan identity.” “Good cinema,” he says, “should portray what is happening in society. It cannot simply be fiction.”

While we can see a difference of opinion on the topic of what makes a film ‘Goan,’ many of the Goan filmmakers interviewed feel that movies sacrifice much to the altar of commerce. As Goan filmmakers there is also the implicit responsibility of exploring the authentic lives and culture of the people of the land. For instance, many of the new movies released in Goa have an aesthetic drawing upon the Christian-inflected culture of Goa, indeed set in Christian cultural milieus; churches and wayside crosses, therefore, are not just religious marker but also markers of culture featured prominently in films. This is significant as much of the cinematic portrayal of Goa imagines this state as influenced by Southern European and Christian culture. Such a process can be seen, no doubt, in the countless Bollywood films set in Goa, but this appears to be a different process. Filmmakers in Goa are drawing on the popularity tiatr artists, a Konkani art form that draws on, and is set in a Christian cultural milieu. “I agree that there is a pattern,” says Shetgaonkar, wherein the films that are popular draw on Christian cultural markers and those that don’t do not find throngs of crowd watching the films twice or thrice.

Barretto, Shetgaonkar, and Moghe all agree that commercial concerns dominate in such creative choices. “We have stopped looking at films as an art-form. Films are like commodities to be bought and sold.” Practical and pressing compulsions like financing the film, necessitates compromises, says Moghe. Barretto, Shetgaonkar, and Moghe feel that such a creative choice of either prominently using tiatr artists or Christian culture has nothing much to do with the fact that Goa’s encounter with the Christian religion and the culture that it spawned over the centuries.

It is interesting to note, in this context, Moghe insisting that the story needs to be told with “honesty”. The Goan directors feel that Goan filmmakers have the potential to deliver stories that are authentic to the culture – provided that there is a fidelity to the nuances of the story. They feel that the difficulties the filmmaking industry presently faces will go away through a refinement of the creative process. 

(A version of this article was first published in The Peacock, 20 November, 2016)

THE FACE OF ‘DEVELOPMENT’

What does ‘development’ mean to the common man? S/he generally expects that the state should provide infrastructure facilities like roads, bridges, hospitals, sports complexes, transport facilities, etc. But while asking for basic amenities is one thing, development is often used to suggest the urgent need of large-scale investments in various types of industries and projects like bridges, stadia, big hotels, etc. The latter – along with its inherent urgency – is often responsible for the destruction of communities and land. There is, therefore, a gap between what development supposedly seeks to achieve and what it eventually ends up doing.

While notions of development may have changed over the years, its core has been the same. Since the day of the establishment of the Indian state, development was linked to economic modernization. More recently this vision of ‘development’ has been augmented with plans for improved urbanization (‘Smart Cities’) and a move to increase the reach of the internet (‘Digital India’). In each of these cases the promotion of ‘development’ is seen as a solution to all, or if not, most of the problems that are faced by the society.

The tourism industry in Goa helps us to see the gap between the theoretical and practical aspects of development. Land and community resources were used in this development, ostensibly, for the betterment of the same land and community that provided the resources. However, this has not been the case with the way the tourism industry has developed. Considering the present situation of the tourism industry, and in view of the fact that the government commissioned a new Master Plan for tourism this year, re-visiting some older blueprints for tourism development such as the ‘Master Plan for Tourism Development in Goa, July 1987’ (MP 1987) that initiated the massive tourism development, leaves little doubt that we need to urgently re-think how community and land resources should be used.

According to MP 1987, the travel industry was growing rapidly and there was a need to catch up with it since Goa could not be “immune” to such a global economic trend. MP 1987 sought to promote tourism, but it had also noted the problems attendant with the tourism industry. It recognized that the “management of tourism is a very complex task. It makes enormous demands on the resources of the place, natural and man-made”. MP 1987 was not in favor of “sacrificing the quality of the local environment” to make quick profit. The destruction of the environment could also lead to the loss of the “cultural mooring” of the local society, the report had warned.

The authors of MP 1987 had also conducted a sample survey of the Calangute-Candolim beach belt, to get a sense of the problems that these areas faced. Even before the advent of large-scale development, the survey revealed a proliferation of unauthorized construction activity, with the commercial activity encroaching on the roads due to a lack of space. The lack of space was leading to traffic congestion. Shortage of drinking water, absence of garbage and sewage management, drug trafficking, prostitution, and high land prices were the other problems identified by MP 1987. The survey also found that tourism development had bred conflict between traditional occupations, like fishing and agriculture, and tourism-related activities. This resulted in social and economic imbalances in the village economy, the report added.

To avoid any adverse effects of tourism development, MP 1987 suggested that it was important to “arrive at a volume of tourism which will bring optimum benefit” to the local people and the national economy. However, the report had admitted, in earnest, that there were “no standards available” to determine the volume of tourists that Goa could handle. Perhaps this might very well be the case as one can observe a contradictory logic running through the report: there are recommendations made for the increase of infrastructure to accommodate the increasing influx of tourists despite the fact that MP 1987 recognized that the carrying capacity of a small place like Goa was limited.

Nearly thirty years later, the Government of Goa has commissioned another Master Plan for tourism. R. Benedito Ferrão recently wrote about this Master Plan and argued that while the Master Plan made suggestions about protecting the environment and involving local Goans, there was precious little said on how exactly to do this. Further, this most recent Master Plan envisaged the role of Goans as only service-providers, and not as stakeholders. This appears to be quite similar to the vision of the MP 1987. While the initial Master Plan was prepared by the government, the recent one was drawn by a MNC. If at all anything has changed it is the shift towards opening of the economy for corporate or private exploitation.

This should force us to recognize that the language and practice of development is marked by a one-way power relation wherein communities – often marginalized – have to bear most of the brunt. While at least the Master Plans of 1987 and 2016 made the effort (or is it pretence?) of involving Goans to benefit from tourism development, other instances such as the often violent and cunning manner in which communities are dispossessed of their lands – in Tiracol, Betul, Loliem, and Mopa – shows us the blatantly brute power of actual ‘development’, as opposed to the subtle variants of the tourism Master Plans.

Rather than the emphasis on development, the importance and utility of public amenities, such as roads, bridges, hospitals for community use, need to be highlighted. The ambiguous language and practice of development needs to be replaced with a concrete vision that keeps marginalized communities and the environment safe.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 23 November, 2016)

THE ‘GOA DECLARATIONS’, FROM CHOGM TO BRICS

There was a sense of déjà vu around the Eighth BRICS summit. In fact, the more one thinks about how the BRICS summit was organized, and how international cooperation in trade and diplomacy was discussed, one is struck by the similarities with the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meet (CHOGM) which though held in New Delhi in 1983, featured Goa as the site of a retreat for all the visiting dignitaries.

Both BRICS 2016 and CHOGM 1983 issued ‘Goa Declarations’. Both these documents can be compared to see how similar or different they are. These declarations contained summaries of the political, diplomatic, and economic challenges ahead of member nations, and how these member-nations would cooperate with each other in the future for a peaceful world. While the declarations made from Goa may have been concerned largely with international cooperation, there seems to be hardly any long-term benefits for Goa. Goa seems to be only a location to strike deals.

These summits are touted to be economically important. In fact, such summits seem to have a contrary effect on the economies of the participating nations. Probably because the economic vision embedded in the ‘Goa Declarations’ are centered on ‘development’, rather than the people.  Take for instance the economic history of Goa post-CHOGM 1983, which ushered in a wave of rapid urbanization along the coast – an area that is both ecologically sensitive and home to communities with traditional livelihoods. Development according to the CHOGM model would mean to bulldoze much of this with little consideration for the people already existing there. CHOGM 1983 and BRICS 2016 provided similar solutions of pumping massive investments through mega-projects in order to rectify the global economic crises. We in Goa do not need to be told the destruction that mega-projects bring to our land and ecology.

A few years after the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Pierre Trudeau, and Robert Mugabe holidayed in Goa, the Goa government formulated a Master Plan for tourism in keeping with the then Central government’s policy on tourism development. Tourism, under this scheme, was conceptualized as benefiting all; one that would modernize Goan society. However this Master Plan was one that precisely promoted the massive mega-projects, and hence the déjà vu hits one hard in the face when the Chief of Protocol, Ministry of External Affairs explained that Goa provided the apt setting for BRICS 2016 because it is “vibrant, cosmopolitan… [and] always been welcoming visitors”.

While CHOGM 1983 can be said to have initiated this massive and unchecked tourism development, BRICS 2016 seems to only build up on the ‘development’ of CHOGM 1983; adding, no doubt, to the activities of such bodies like the Investment Promotion Board in promoting mega-projects. The infrastructure for BRICS 2016 already existed due to the economic model espoused by CHOGM 1983. While CHOGM 1983 created Goa as a location of luxury tourism consumption, BRICS 2016 sustains such luxury consumption. This is precisely the neo-liberal economic agenda that Goans need to be guarded against.

Part of the neo-liberal agenda of CHOGM 1983 was to discard “protectionism” and allow for the domestic markets of member countries to be opened up to foreign manufactures in order to fix the global economy. In turn, while noting that the global economy as it stands today needs recovery BRICS 2016 indicated its support to the policies of the World Trade Organization, in effect, to foster trade by further opening the domestic markets. This would mean, then as now, that small and cottage industries would not get any special protection should a multi-national company market similar goods. While big industrialists and businessmen may delight over the benefits of such summits, common people would obviously be less enthusiastic, given that these benefits rarely trickle down.

More tourism would also mean the indiscriminate destruction of land. While CHOGM 1983 saw the acquisition of new land for roads and hotels, BRICS 2016 did not witness any such new land acquisition, although there were protests about suspicious-looking land usage proposals. There was, one thinks, no more land along the coast to acquire for new hotel resorts, being as it is over saturated with starred hotels. This process of land acquisition has never been a happy one for subjects of the Indian state, Goans included. For instance, during CHOGM 1983, we have reports available of two elderly ladies, Josephine Lobo, and Preciosa Menezes (then aged 73 and 75 respectively) who fought against the takeover of their land for the expansion of a starred hotel. The septuagenarians were not the only ones to have opposed the ‘development’ during CHOGM 1983, with other CHOGM-related projects, too, coming under protests.

In fact it can be said that collaborations such as BRICS will accentuate this form of tourism, despite the use of such terms like “sustainable development” in their economic vision. One can see that the ‘development’ that BRICS-like summits tend to promote also tend to acquire land – first were the coastal areas, now it seems to be moving to the hinterland; to the plateaus of Betul, Mopa, and more recently Loliem. The ‘development’ that BRICS espouses ultimately needs land, and in a place where land is scare this can only mean disaster.

For these reasons – and particularly due to the fact that not much has changed for the good from CHOGM 1983 – Goans must be clear that summits like BRICS and CHOGM are wasteful and have only suspicious returns to those who host them. And when they are over, the hosts (or the people of Goa) are the ones who are left to clean up the mess.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 9 November, 2016)

COLONY LOST?

An article in The Guardian recently claimed “artists” and “hipsters” to be the new agents that drive the process of gentrification. Though the article was about the current situation in Britain, similarities could be drawn with Goa’s own fraught tourism-led development. According to the article, artists and hipsters “are the neoliberal state’s troops”. Artists first move into certain areas that seem to have decayed or have not developed, and “sow the seeds of cultural capital. ... Both artists and (some) of the hipsters – the ones who haven’t ‘settled’ yet – will move on, exploring, breaking away (again), developing new potential sites for capital investment. And so the cycle of gentrification starts all over”.

The Goan parallels with the quote above may not be obvious on first reading. Goa’s unchecked development of the tourism and real-estate industry started with Goa being exposed to the neoliberal economic setup of India. What has this to do with the influx of artists and hipsters in Goa? The idea of Goa as a ‘touristic heaven’ or a ‘pleasure periphery’ was constructed on a Goan landscape that was populated by agrarian villages, making the acquisition of  real-estate, in due course of time, elite status symbols coveted by the artists, writers, and the upwardly mobile professionals from Indian metros – or the catch-all desi misnomer, “culturewallahs”. The neoliberal economic setup and the easy mobility afforded by the Indian nation-state led to the large scale gentrification of sea-side villages that we are witnessing today – a process either exemplified by the rise of ‘mega projects’ or the emergence of ‘Portuguese houses’ as markers of chic and luxurious lifestyle.

Another parallel is how people who drive this gentrification in Goa can leave anytime for better pastures. Very often the “culturewallahs” who move to Goa claim that their commitment to Goa and its people is much deeper than a sudden decision to shift to Goa. It is not simply an investment in Goan real estate. However, a recent assertion by Deepti Kapoor, who had moved to Goa but has now decided to go elsewhere due to the deteriorating situation here, testifies to the skin-deep character of this commitment. It also reveals the disaster that gentrification is, for Goans, who unfortunately have to live in the mess that such a development leaves behind. What does Goa get out of this? Art? And what is the relevance of such art?

To say that the affluent global and Indian elites can move to Goa due to the financial resources available to them is only half the story. This is why we need to dwell on the notion of ‘colony’ in relation to gentrification. Like the colonies established during the height of European imperialism, the ‘colonies’ established by the real-estate industry have an element of exclusivity to them. One’s social location determines who gets access into these ‘colonies’. To think of gentrification as a process by which ‘colonies’ get established allows us to see that rather than being harbingers of modernization and progress – or of art or culture – they are, in fact, a recapitulation of South Asia’s age-old and timeless hierarchies. 

It is the emergence of such ‘colonies’ that defines the ‘brand value’ of Goa in recent times. These gentrified places, while a good economic investment, also simultaneously become a refuge for the rich…a utopia tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the world. Thus, while these places are physically enclosed by way of allowing access only to a privileged few, they are also cut-off from the social and political realities of the world. Only when these utopian places are threatened for any kind of reason – then one sees a remarkable outrage that gets blown out of proportion.

 

Pic: Vishvesh Kandolkar

Consider the recent case of the unfortunate murder of a perfume-maker who had made Goa her home. Her death was mourned by a huge outrage. The critique that the same attention was not paid to another murder which happened on the same day is insufficient. The reason why one person’s murder was discussed down to its last detail and the other was almost ignored was also due to the fact that the other murder occurred in a nondescript ‘vaddo’. To be fair, most of the gentrified neighborhoods that have emerged in Goan villages have been constructed in various ‘vadde’, but the gentrification makes all the difference. Compared to the genteel location of the murder of the Goa-based perfumer, the nondescript ‘vaddo’ in a Goan village is insignificant.

Juxtaposing the social and physical locations of the two murders allows us to see that the comments by numerous glitterati and literati to declare categorically that the crime against the perfumer signaled the demise of the once great Goa, is nothing but a fear of losing privilege. It is not an outrage marked by concern for Goa. For the same people couldn’t care any less when large chunks of Goan land were (and are) grabbed from ordinary, hard-working Goans. Considering that most of the land grabbed from Goans goes largely to build resorts, second-homes, and ‘colonies’ made available for the disposable pleasure of the same elites, one can understand why there isn’t any outrage.

Gentrification thus is a process by which localities get taken over by the rich, simultaneously pushing out the locals. It is also a process by which the locals are slowly rendered powerless. Goa’s problem with gentrification does not need any outrage or lamentations of demise, but to recognize first that the problem exists, and what and who engendered it. 

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 26 October, 2016)