https://www.heraldgoa.in/details.php?n_id=217076
On January 22nd earlier this week - an historic day filled with complicated feelings - I had the distinct privilege and pleasure of talking and walking across the breadth of Panjim from Campal to Fontainhas in the company of the brilliant Hindi-language novelist and writer Geetanjali Shree (who won the 2021 International Booker Prize for *Ret Samadhi*, translated as *Tomb of Sand* by Daisy Rockwell) and her husband, the distinguished historian Sudhir Chandra. It was an opportunity to think deeply about what it means to belong to India at this majoritarian moment, as the prime minister declared at the new “temple of national consciousness” that “Ram is the faith of India, Ram is the foundation of India. Ram is the idea of India. Ram is the law of India. Ram is the prestige of India. Ram is the glory of India. Ram is the leader and Ram is the policy.” This is where we have reached 2024, but my introduction to Goa’s distinct cultural history for Shree and Chandra started in the 19th century, with the statue of Francisco Luis Gomes, the 19th century physician, economist, politician and writer who argued for liberty, equality and fraternity for all Indians. In some ways, he is also Shree’s direct intellectual ancestor, because his impassioned anti-caste 1864 *Os Brâmanes* is one of the first Indian novels. However, there’s also a straight line from Gomes to Ambedkar due to their emphasis on economics, and unyielding demands for parity in all dimensions. The great Goan pioneer could be lyrical, as in his famous 1861 letter to Alphonse de Lamartine, the poet-statesman of France’s Second Republic: “I was born in India, the cradle of poetry, philosophy and history, today its tomb. I belong to that race which wrote the Mahabharata and invented Chess – two conceptions that bear in them the eternal and the infinite [but] this nightingale has lost its voice. I demand for India, liberty and light!” But he also highly effectively deployed the language of rights, insisting “there should not be any distinction between the natives of India and those of Portugal, other than that of merit.” On the 22nd, our slow, voluble stroll towards the oldest precincts of Panjim took in many of the city’s monuments to resistance: the building-sized mural tribute to Sita Valles, the gutsy and glamorous (and martyred very young) Pasionára of Angola’s freedom struggle by the sensational young British-Israeli-Goan artist Solomon Souza; the Azad Maidan memorial for Tristão Braganza Cunha, who ardently advocated for Indian nationalism in 1920s Europe; and the dramatic statue of José Custódio (Abbé) Faria next to Palácio do Idalcão, where there is both literary history (because this Candolim-born priest is immortalized in *The Count of Monte Cristo* by Alexandre Dumas) and the political, as Faria and his father plotted against the Portuguese colonial regime. Making our way through pleasantly empty streets, my walking companions and I kept dwelling on the ideas of India that still bind us together, across places and cultures as disparate as the profoundly cosmopolitan ancient entrepôts on the Konkan and Malabar coastline and the “Hindi heartland” which has come to dominate the contemporary national polity. Later, when I emailed Shree, she told me that “the entire morning with you and Goa was important for me because it was an assertion - reassertion, if you will - of our being another way than what was being celebrated that same time in Ayodhya and elsewhere; of us being syncretic, pluralistic, co-mingled and co-shaped (if I may coin the term!) in our cultures, traditions, religions, everything.” These sentiments have preoccupied the author throughout her career, as she writes in a revealing 2011 essay in *Caravan*. After her first novel was published in 1993 came “frenetic years in our national life. They brought to the fore certain cataclysmic changes that had been brewing subterraneously. Those changes began surfacing obtrusively with LK Advani’s Rath Yatra, which culminated in the first unsuccessful assault on the Babri Masjid, and a spate of violence against Muslims in several cities. Eventually, these events climaxed in the demolition of the masjid and the eruption of unprecedented cruelty against Muslims in Surat and Mumbai. The best the nation had upheld lay shattered. As a writer, I felt paralysed. Could I possibly write about anything but this? How could I write about this? Would it not be vulgar to think of aesthetics in writing about this? Aesthetics apart, could one understand what one was condemned to witnessing? It seemed that something beyond settled habits of thought, familiar categories and received modes of saying things was required to make sense of, and articulate, the events of this period. Instead, every time I sought to think and say something differently, it ended up being expressed in the same hackneyed way. Yet, it was impossible not to write.” The immediate result was *Hamara Shahar Us Baras*, which is now also being translated by Daisy Rockwell. Earlier this year, this superb American translator from Hindi and Urdu (who has attended several editions of the Goa Arts + Literature Festival) told *The Chakkar *the 1998 novel “depicts the 1992 riots in Gujarat. One realises from this novel that she is interested not just in the Partition of India and Pakistan, but also in the ongoing, continuous partition of Indian society. I feel that those continuous partitions are her inspiration for *Tomb of Sand*. This is an acute insight, and Shree later reiterated to me that “it is important to remember that the so-called cow belt is not just about 'regressive' elements. In fact, it partners Goa par excellence in the kind of syncretism we spent our morning discovering and celebrating. It is in that cow-belt that so many of us have been born and bred, and we will not be extinguished, whatever the wave at a particular time may indicate. Like I said that morning, this is their moment. Our moment will return. No matter if it doesn't in my/our lifetime.” In our conversations on the go, I was struck by Shree’s reference to “the solace of not belonging” when we were talking about who was being excluded and included on that avowedly epochal day in Ayodhya. Via email, she explained that “I had in mind an existence - a state of being - which is beyond the binaries of 'belonging' and 'not belonging', of 'us' and 'them'. Rejecting any fixed singular identity or belonging, this state of being comprises an indefinite fluid, hopefully growing, multiplicity of identities and belongings. 'Belonging' becomes too easily, a narrow, rigid, exclusionary identity. Even when excluded by self-appointed guardians of a given identity, I refuse to consider myself excluded. In concrete terms, living in the present majoritarian moment, I would rather assert my Hindu/national identity than surrender it to those who are exclusionary, even as they make a slogan of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. By the same token, we - the likes of us - cannot be excluded from the majoritarian moment. Rather, we refuse to be included in the moment. That is the solace of not belonging. The solace of not losing our humanity.” -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Goa-Research-Net" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to goa-research-net+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/goa-research-net/CAN1wPW6So67KMgo8e_Y7_6Ph9iT9ze234Ys9fsB7mkN6ORu-5A%40mail.gmail.com.