Diaspora and the Goan Experience - 2

By Cielo Griselda Festino 

continued from Goan Diaspora Part 1

Leaving Goa and Dreaming of Homecoming

James Clifford points out that diasporas "presuppose longer distances, a separation more like exile and a taboo on return or its postponement to a remote future"  (1997:246), while William Safran says that the terms “‘diaspora and diaspora communities’ seem to be used as metaphoric designations for several categories of people: expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants and ethnical and racial minorities tout court” (1999:364). The Goan diaspora fits these definitions since there is not a single modality in Goan life that is not influenced, directly or indirectly, by the different migratory waves both to the country and away from it. Before actually focusing on the diaspora, however, I believe that a brief account of Goan society at home seems to be in order here to better understand their idiosyncrasy and diasporic consciousness.

Goa is a small region  of 3400 sq.km on the west coast of India. Its highly hybrid population reflects its different historical moments. Its society is made up of great number of social groups related in a complex way. There are three main religious groups, Hindus, Catholics and Muslims. This is due to the fact that Goa was governed by Hindu and Muslim dynasties successively until the arrival of the Portuguese in  the fifteenth century. In turn, this brought about a cultural syncretism  that has as one of its main features the fact that not only Hindus but also Catholics are divided in castes and, on the other hand, the fact that many Sudras --members of the lower Hindu caste— adopted the Catholic religion as a result of the intensive missionary penetration on the part of the Portuguese and in order to get a better position in society[1].

By extension, several languages are spoken in its territory: Konkani, the mother tongue, which, as Stella Mascarenhas-Keyes explains, was suppressed during the colonial regime but, after 1961, Goans have been bent on recovering; Portuguese which was imposed in Goa and the rest of the empire as the language of imperial administration, and English which came to replace Portuguese, now in decline,  when Goa joined the Indian Union. Therefore, in Goa there is a rich literary tradition in the three languages. 

This linguistic hybridity permeates most literary texts manifesting itself, on the one hand, in the vocabulary and the syntax and, on the other hand, in the fact that Indian cultural themes should be expressed in Western languages. As Alfred Menezes Braganza highlights, “[There are] Goan litterateurs writing in Portuguese on subjects that are necessarily Indian. […] There are Goan poets in Portuguese. There are Goan novelists in Portuguese. There are other writers in Portuguese in the other different genres of literature. The recurring theme is either Goa or India” (Goan Reader,151).

 In Sorrowing Lies my Land (1955), his most renowned novel, Lambert Mascarenhas textualizes this characteristic of Goan literature. It is narrated from the point of view of a Goan man who reconstructs as an adult the days of his childhood during the Portuguese imperial administration. At one moment, he tells about a conversation he had with a friend about their new teacher during their first day at school:  “I have not seen her, but my father says that she is a Bramane,’ said Inacinho, son of the big landlord Senhor Roque Santana…” (Goan Reader, 25). As this brief excerpt shows, the novel is written in English, the names of the characters are in Portuguese and the matter that upsets Inacinho is the caste the teacher belongs to.

 This discursive quality, then, is the outcome of the colonial experience which, as Peter Nazareth points out, is deeply ingrained in Goan society: “Goans have been through a long denationalizing colonial experience which still affects both the social reality and the psyche” (Goan Reader,3), and which, in his opinion, has brought about a cultural stagnation which permeates its literature.

Along these lines, Nazareth goes on to say that one fact that called his attention  when he selected the texts to be included in this reader on Goan literature was that though many of them had a high literary value, in other cases “the subjects seemed hopelessly romantic, the treatment archaic, the psyche concerned with the irrelevant” (Goan Reader,2). The answer that Nazareth proposes to this dilemma is, again, directly linked to the colonial experience. He says that this might be due to the long years of Salazar´s dictatorship in Portugal and the consequent colonial rule in Goa that brought about a paralysis of the creative impulse in all the Empire[2].

to part 3 [overleaf]

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