Public monuments, palliative solutions? Political geographies of memory in Goa, India

ABSTRACT

This article examines some of the compromises that emerge in the process of converting colonial-era material culture into ‘heritage’ claiming to foreground a critical postcolonial consciousness. Prompted by recent controversies about statuary celebrating figures who engaged in colonial exploitation and slavery, I look at how frictions inherited from the colonial period are projected onto colonialism’s physical remains. This article, however, enquires into ways in which disputes over the proper function of postcolonial heritage projects may be framed not in a militant, but in a conciliatory register, that aims to accommodate diverse representational imperatives, instead of elevating one as supreme. In postcolonial settings such as the one discussed, these imperatives awkwardly include the tourism industry's promotion of ‘colonial nostalgia’ via the restoration of ‘colonial ambiences’. Focusing on a Portuguese-era fort that served as a prison for Goa’s 'freedom-fighters', I investigate the unexplained, and subsequently contentious, display of pictures authored by the nationally-renowned artist Mario Miranda in one section of the fort. The article then recounts the contours of a public challenge to this exhibition’s legitimacy, and examines the introduction in an adjacent space at the fort of a Freedom Fighters’ Gallery. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, I analyse tensions within and between each of these exhibitions, connecting them to deeper fissures in colonial experience and postcolonial memory. I argue that these fissures are best understood in their relationship to recriminations both about colonial experience and about inequalities traceable to its ‘aftermaths’, which are now consolidated in uneven political geographies.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonial nostalgia
• conciliatory heritage
• public culture
• tourism industry
• Goa

Acknowledgements

Uwe Skoda and Manuela Ciotti supervised the doctoral dissertation from which this article has been adapted. I am very grateful to them for their guidance. Gerard da Cunha and Rafael Viegas generously facilitated archival access to rare publications in which Mario Miranda’s art appeared. I thank them and my various other interlocutors for sharing insights and opinions that I discuss in this paper. Finally, I’d like to express my genuine appreciation for the helpful feedback I received from two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term ‘freedom fighters’ has a valence in present-day Goa which cannot be assumed to coincide with its valence in the mid-twentieth century. While research would be needed to historicize the changing import of this designation, I will say tentatively that it refers to those who engaged in forms of militancy, civil disobedience, and collective organization from the 1920s onward, that were broadly anti-Portuguese and pro-Indian. The demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the people referred to as Goa’s ‘freedom fighters’ are far from clear, but it seems to me that they belonged in the main to the middle- and lower-middle classes, and were based largely in Goa, and the neighbouring states of Karnataka and Maharashtra. There were also members of Goa’s cosmopolitan upper class who petitioned the Portuguese State and the Indian National Congress in common cause and shared sentiment with the ‘freedom fighters’, even engaging in organising of their own (Lobo 2014; Parobo 2015; Pinto 2009). However, they tend to be referred to as ‘nationalists’ and ‘intellectuals’ rather than as ‘freedom fighters’. There is an unmistakable class-dimension to the use of these terms. In addition, it is also possible that the ‘freedom fighters’ had a higher proportion of Hindus among them than Catholics than is the case for those referred to as Goa’s ‘nationalists’ and ‘intellectuals’, but this claim needs verification.

2 There is more literature about the social psychology of elite Goan Catholics who met the criteria for assimilation to metropolitan status than there is about the social psychology of elite groups of Hindus in Goa, for whom various accommodations were made by the Portuguese administration on account of the political and economic influence they wielded. It is reasonable to speculate that even though Goa’s elite Hindus were differently interpellated in the matrices of colonial authority than the Catholics, they too feared that a political integration of Goa with India might lead to a loss in their status and power, and took measures to prevent this from occurring. Teotonio de Souza (1987), Pratima Kamat (1999) and Raghuraman Trichur (2013) touch on this subject.

3 Anti-colonial nationalism in India was ideologically diverse, and was championed in different ways by bourgeois, conservative, socialist, and communist factions that resorted to a wide range of violent and non-violent means. Of particular relevance to understanding present-day uses of the term 'nationalist' is the brand of 'Hindu nationalism' that has dominated Indian politics since the 2014 election to the central government of a far-right coalition led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and fronted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Contrasting with the more secular nationalism traditionally espoused by Congress-led governments, and different also from the ideology expressed by the previous BJP-led coalition that was in power at the centre between 1998-2004, it forms the disciplinary wrapping for a neoliberal agenda designed by, and for, India’s class of monopoly capitalists (Desai 2017).

4 That there was resentment among the subject population in the Estado da India toward the colonial administration, and awareness among these subjects that inequalities in the social order proceeded in part from place of origin and skin-colour is, of course, well documented [see, for example, G.V. Scammell (1988), Axelrod and Fuerch (1996)]. Also documented are instances of defiance and mutiny on the part of Goa’s population. However, to call such protest ‘anti-colonial’ or ‘anti-racist’ presumes consciousness of colonialism and racism as abstract figurations, besides also presuming a sense of shared identity among the colonised. It is not clear from secondary sources that such consciousness existed for the dates in question (Kamat 1999; Lobo 2014; Pinto 2009).

5 In the mid-eighteenth century, the colonial state, which until that time had a consolidated presence on the territories of Tiswadi, Salcete and Bardez, acquired neighbouring territories that were under the control of Hindu feudal chiefs called dessais (the Rane family was among them). These regions, corresponding to the sub-districts of Pernem, Bicholim, Sattari, Ponda, Sanguem, Quepem and Canacona, and constituting about 75% of the land area of present-day Goa, are together referred to as the New Conquests.

6 African conscripts from Mozambique were among the Portuguese soldiers stationed in Goa in the last decades of colonial rule (Gupta 2011b).

7 There are other instances from around this period that attest to Portugal’s production and use of maps for propagandist purposes both in the metropole and in the colonies, especially to uphold the idea of 'a multi-continental nation' (Bastos 2005). One such example, discussed in Pina-Cabral (2017) involved the superimposition of the 'country’s mid-twentieth century colonial possessions' onto the map of Europe to advertise its imperial extent. See also Madureira (2008) for a rich personal account.

8 The Shiv Sena (literally Shiv’s Army) is a political party that was founded in Maharashtra in 1966 by Bal Thackeray, a man who transitioned to politics from a career as a cartoonist (in his early cartooning years, he was in fact a colleague of Mario Miranda). The party espouses a variety of Hindu nationalism which has some convergences with the ideology of the pan-national Bharatiya Janata Party, though it differs in its emphasis on Maratha nativism. The party has made limited inroads in Goa.

9 It is, however, likely that some other freedom fighters shared a concern that their trials had not been acknowledged at the fort (Menezes 2014).

10 The subject appears to have first been addressed conceptually by Caroline Ifeka (1985) in an essay titled ‘The Image of Goa’.

11 The Revolutionary Goans are, as of this writing in 2022, no longer ‘incipient’ in their political evolution or maturity. In November 2021, they registered for the first time as a political party in Goa and contested the state assembly elections in February 2022. Though the party secured one seat out of forty in the state legislature, it obtained nearly ten percent of the total vote-share, coming in third after the much more established and monied parties of the BJP and the Congress.

12 It is worth noting that the Person of Goan Origin (POGO) Bill builds on appeals that surfaced already in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when 'native Goans', responding to the perception that their prospects were being eroded on account of immigration from other parts of India, demanded reserved places for themselves in 'the public service and industry' (Newman 1984). The government of former Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar also petitioned the Central Government to grant Goa a 'special status' that would 'prevent sale of land to non-Goans' (Sampat 2015, 782).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Erasmus Mundus IBIES (International Bridges in Indo-European Studies) PhD grant 2012-2637 disbursed by Aarhus University in Denmark.