https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/india-and-the-world-the-meaning-of-goa/articleshow/62953954.cms
Look at the map from the perspective of land borders, and India’s smallest state is an insignificant pinprick of territory tucked away on a western coastal extremity of the subcontinent. But turn the prospect around to think of the vast oceans as the main location of cultural flow, contact and exchanges that they are, and you really begin to understand the essential importance of entrepots. As Ranjit Hoskote said earlier this week in Panaji, that switch in outlook is crucial to understanding Goa’s function over millennia as an important crucible of “entanglements, exchanges and transfusions”. Hoskote was hosting an “outreach programme” that is collateral to the exhibition, ‘India and the World: A History in Nine Stories’, at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai. This collaboration between the host institution, the British Museum in London and the National Museum in New Delhi brought together hundreds of objects from the main partners as well as 20 smaller museums and private collections across India. The Museum of Christian Art in Old Goa lent its showstopper monstrance in silver, and was the host of the Panjim event, ‘In the shade of the Calpataru’. Another of the evening’s speakers, Delhi-based academic Jonathan Gil Harris reiterated Hoskote’s point that it is important to look at some of the broader questions of identity, culture and tradition from the perspective of Goa. He said that this required an acknowledgement that “all culture is actually conversation, indeed a function of translation”. This is one of the main themes of his 2015-released book, ‘The First Firangis: Remarkable Stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans & other Foreigners who Became Indian’. That book of history is full of examples of transnational characters, including Garcia da Orta (‘the Hakeem of Bombay and Ahmednagar’), Thomas Stephens (‘Patri Guru, the Kavi of Rachol’) and Juliana Dias da Costa (‘the Jagirdar of Jogabai’). In his individual presentation preceding a panel discussion, Hoskote spoke about Jose Custodio (Abbe) de Faria, the Candolim-born priest who achieved significant notoriety in Rome and Lisbon before intriguing at considerable length in post-revolutionary France in the late 18th century. That journey from India to Europe is the precise opposite to what was accomplished by Thomas Stephens in the 16th century. Gil Harris recounted how the Oxford-educated Englishman wrote the first printed grammar of any Asian language on Konkani (in 1640), Arte da Lingoa Canarim, and later the singular Krista Purana in a unique mixture of Marathi and Konkani that is profoundly influenced by both Greek classical literature as well as his contemporary, the great bhakti poet Eknath. One of India’s leading tabla players, the scholarly Aneesh Pradhan described the trajectory of Kesarbai Kerkar, who was born into a devadasi family in Goa in 1892, then shifted to colonial Bombay to pursue the study of Hindustani music in her teens, and eventually became such a celebrated exponent that hers was the only Indian voice included on the gold-plated Voyager Golden Record compilation of great world music that was sent into space on board the US’ Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1977. Here too was a story of infinite adaptability and ambitious transformation, as the girl from Keri became imperious Padma Bhushan award-winning “Surashree” legend. Three life stories that played out in markedly different spaces in varying time periods. Yet, there are deep resonances. One intriguing suggestion made by Gil Harris was those who carry secrets eventually drive cultural production. This certainly makes sense with regard to the spectacular flowering of Goan aesthetics throughout the 19th century, with its bountiful efflorescence of a new architecture, music, cuisine and artistic approach that is poised confidently between East and West. The secret, so to speak, is complexity (which Hoskote astutely pointed out is another word for complicity). With political and economic clout, the Goans of the time felt comfortable expressing the fullness of their identity, some of which had fallen dormant in the face of overt colonial intolerance. India is currently lurching through an era of impositions on its age-old pluralist values. Instead of unity in diversity, the prevailing mantra appears to be uniformity. In this cultural strangulation, Goa stands out to continually confound the would-be homogenizers. Here, the narrow communal calculus winds up with a bottom line of zero. Here, humanism trumps bigotry almost every time. It is an increasingly invaluable example for the rest of India and the world.
