Some of these make me cry, due to the ambiguities and contradictions involved in the process of the historical growth of "my people". In the course of my 62 years of life
-- 12 of these spent in India but outside Goa for University studies, and the past 14 in Portugal accompanying the former colonialists in their University studies -- I have been part of the Goan onion wrappings.

         This is not a damage controlling Gunterian
         confession, but I may admit that I was born legally
         as Portuguese in colonial Goa without my choice in
         February 1947 (while rest of the country was on the
         threshold of independence). I became an Indian
         without my choice by a legislative process which
         followed the expulsion of the Portuguese colonial
         regime.

Our personal destiny greatly shaped by such unchosen developments of the collective history. Mine was no exception and some important life decisions became dependent upon the best available opportunities, but hardly of my choice.

It was only in 1995 that I could find the right conditions to re-orient my life. Recovery of the Portuguese nationality was then an option.  Similary, the recovery of the Indian nationality as OCI in 2007 was another option. These were hard and thoughtful decisions, and reflect my way of integrating consciously, freely and appreciatively the major elements that have contributed to shape my identity as a Goan.

         In the past I had seen the same elements as forced
         into my identity.  Now I feel that I have come to
         terms with my identity and feel proud of it. That
         is a process I wish for every Goan.

Post-liberation generations, and most visitors and recent settlers in Goa are not sufficiently clear about what precisely makes up the Portuguese cultural legacy. Many "outsiders" (bhaile for the native Goans) come imbibed with Salman Rushdies imagery of Goans who love to light candles to the kababed saints and tandooried martyrs which they preserve reverentially in the home oratories.

At the close of the Portuguese colonial regime in Goa, after nearly four and half centuries of intense and sustained batterings of the Portuguese law, church rituals and inquisition threats on a small enclave, Goans could not escape adopting overt and covert cultural habits that distinguish them from the rest of the inhabitants of the subcontinent.

To illustrate the reaction of the Goan Christian elite to liberation, I cannot resist quoting a somewhat lengthy paragraph from Rushdies The Moors Last Sigh depicting a character modeled after Mario Miranda:

         "When the Indian Army entered Goa, ending 451 years
         of Portuguese colonial rule Vasco was plunged for
         weeks into one of his black-dog depressions. Aurora
         encouraged him to see the event as a liberation, as
         many Goans did, but he was inconsolable. Up to now
         I had only three Gods and the Virgin Mary to
         disbelieve in, he complained. Now I have three
         hundred million. And what Gods! For my taste, they
         have too many heads and hands

         "On the night of Indias independence, the red mist
         came over him in a rush. The contradictions of that
         high moment tore him apart. That celebration of
         freedom whose engulfing emotions he could not avoid
         even though, as a Goan, he was technically not
         involved -- he drank vinho verde in quantity and at
         speed, sunk in darkness."

But the impact of the Portuguese brand of Christianity could also be felt on ordinary rural Goan Christian women. For instance, they all love to put flowers in their hair just as would any other Goan woman, but they take them off when leaving home.

When I asked my mother once why she did that, her only explanation was: Kristanv bhail ghara bhair fulam mau na. I discovered a reason in the course of my research, namely in the course of the 16th century the church provincial councils had decreed under severe penalties that women should discontinue the practice of divination by sticking flower petals with saliva to the left or right side of a temple idol and waiting to see which petal would fall first to decide if a wish would be granted or not.

By banning the use of flowers in the hair while outdoors would thus prevent the woman from being tempted to continue an old "gentile" practice. For such and other "lapses and re-lapses" many Goans were hauled before the Inquisition tribunal and punished at autos-da-fé during two and half centuries of its operation in Goa.

We can only imagine from distance in time the intimidation and terror it may have had on men and women torn away from their families and kept in the dungeons of the Inquisition.
Several of these never returned to their families, or perhaps some did after serving six to ten years as forced labour in galleys or gunpowder manufactory.

         The Provincial of the Goa Jesuits, my co-villager
         and a trained psychologist, Fr. Tony da Silva S.J.,
         analysed once in a seminar organized by me at the
         Xavier Centre of Historical Research in 1992 the
         permanent impact such intimidation left upon Goan
         psyche for times to come. We are experiencing the
         unwinding in some of the social excesses that we
         have been witnessing in the post-liberation era.

I wish to recall another incident that left me baffled  some years ago. It was the statement of an orthodox Hindu Brahmin from Pune. He came to Goa in the wake of the liberation as the Director of Goa Historical Archives and stayed in that job till his retirement about 20 years later. Like many other such non-Goan officers that were little welcomed by Goans and were labeled as "deputationists", he too decided to live his retired life in Goa.

Dr. Gune acquired a house near Mangueshi temple and  believed that he could continue his hobby as astrologer (jyotishi) and earn some complement to his pension. My surprise was to hear from him some three years later that he had decided to leave Goa. He was disillusioned with Goan Hindus, whom he denounced as "different", a milder way of saying that they were corrupted by the Portuguese influence. They did not meet his requirements of Hindu orthodoxy!

         Until this moment I had only noticed -- like most
         Goans do till today -- the differences between Goan
         Hindus and Christians. I needed a Hindu from
         outside Goa to bring the similarities to my notice.

Goa  had been in its past history, at least since the 11th century, under the Kadambas, linked to a widespread network of Afro-Asian seaborne trade, and of hinterland trade with the Deccan through ghat passes.

         The integration of Goa into the Portuguese eastern
         empire after 1510 catapulted it into an unforeseen
         scale of operations. As headquarters of an early
         modern European empire from 1530, Goa exposed its
         inhabitants very early to the challenges of modern
         globalization.

If the early decline of the Portuguese failed to sustain this process, the economic pressures and the cultural acquisitions permitted the Goans to avail of the opportunities presented by the British empire in the neighbouring territories, particularly since the establishment of the rail link.

Ironically, the allegedly harassed Hindu community of Saraswats -- one-sided historical perspective conveniently bandied around for political gains in post-liberation times
-- sustained the fiscal-commercial structure of the Portuguese in Goa, and the Hindu dubhashis effectively served their diplomatic needs in Asia as extensively documented by Dr. P.S.S. Pissurlencar in his Agentes da Diplomacia Portuguesa na India (1952).

Without such vital support the Portuguese colonialism in Goa would have short-circuited and burnt out very much earlier than it did. But the self-interested collaboration of Goan Hindus gave lots of time for masses of poor Christians, and allegedly protected by the Portuguese Christian rule, to make a bee-line as emigrants to eke out their living in British India.

It should never be forgotten however that it was the structure of the Portuguese Church Padroado throughout Asia, manned largely by native Goan clergy from the 19th century onwards, that gave the scattered Goan emigrants the emotional sustenance they needed away from their homeland.

The Padroado parishes in Bombay and the village kudd dedicated to the patron-saints of the respective parishes in Goa were the visible and effective props in the process of adaptation to painful socio-economic challenges.

         The church connection also helped developing the
         musical talent of many Goans, and the westernized
         culinary skills opened job markets for many Goans
         in British India. Sad to say also, the tradition of
         an international slave market where females and
         males from different countries were bought and sold
         (and that made Portuguese Goa famous through the
         writings of the Dutchman Linschotten and other
         contemporary foreign travelers) contributed to the
         exodus of many Goan women who earned their living
         with prostitution in Bombay.

If language is a core component of any social identity, it may surprise us to find that Goans preserved their language even during the colonial period; barely five percent of Goan population could read, write and speak in Portuguese according to the last census of the colonial regime. These included ethnic Portuguese serving in Goa and and one hundred or so mestiços and luso-descendentes.

According to statistics presented by Dr. Froilano de Mello as deputy to the Portuguese Parliament on 24 January 1947, English schools were experiencing fast growth in Goa, while the Portuguese Lyceum languished!  He referred to 63 private English schools in Goa employing 389 local teachers and 71 foreigners. They had a total of 8890 pupils! That meant 22 times more than those who frequented the Portuguese lyceum!
The needs of emigration to British India fuelled this trend.

Rural folks in Goa and low middle class emigrants held fast to their Konkani. However, close contact with the Portuguese clergy during the early centuries after conversion, elementary training in the parish schools, and compulsory primary schooling in Portuguese since 50s, resulted in the absorption of a hefty proportion of Portuguese loan-words into the spoken Konkani of Goan Christians.

         Fuj-da-put (filho da puta), bonku (bom cú),
         fodricho (foder), etc. became common folk
         utterances alongside besanv (benção), maldisanv
         (maldição), etcSuch linguistic colonialism,
         despite the colourful ingredients, greatly
         endangered the healthy growth of Konkani language
         and many decades of sustained efforts became
         necessary after 1961 to restore its
         linguistic-cultural legitimacy and standards so as
         to make it acceptable as the official State
         language in 1987 and to permit its entry in the
         Constitutional schedule in 1992.

No discussion on Goan identity can be complete by ignoring the caste system that dogs the Goan society.  To konnalo (to which family does he belong?) is a question which a good Goan usually asks or intends to ask, be it in Goa or anywhere in the world. Goans married to non-Goans and living in non-Goan ambiance may care to ignore the caste linkage, and even in Goa today money and power call shots.

However, deep in the unconscious a Brahmin knows he is a Brahmin, a Chardo resents being a Chardo, and the same old trap works. Spoken Konkani retains grammatical inflections and vocabulary preferences that identify castes, such as aila and eila, taka and teka, sokoilo and khailo, etc.

         Despite all the haute couture and other external
         shenigans that Goans have acquired over time and
         make them presentable global citizens, the Goan
         identity has yet to break out of its caste-shell. A
         glance at the archives of Goanet (www.goanet.org,
         the oldest and global Goan Internet discussion
         forum) should confirm my point.

Thus caste remains a challenge for Goans for yet another millennium. It is what the Portuguese would call a pedra no sapato, a cultural irritant that we need to learn to freely detach from the requisites of our personal and collective identity.  Until we can eradicate it, we can hardly call ourselves global Goans. We will remain puny caste-bound Goans doing relatively well globally. In the meantime only the common cause against the "bhaile" will distract us from our schizophrenia.

--

Dr Souza is a prominent Indo-Portuguese historian. This essay was written for the recently-published Semana de Cultura Goa 2008, edited by Vivek Menezes vmingoa@gmail.com