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Cross pollination: a look at a new nuanced portrait of Goa's Catholics
Prabuddha Dasgupta's new book
is a nuanced portrait of the
hybrid culture of Goa's
Catholics, writes Vivek
Menezes <vmin...@gmail.com>
When photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta took a vacation from his
job in Delhi to visit Goa for the first time in 1983, he,
like most first-time visitors, headed straight for the beach.
"Coming from where I was living at the time, this place
immediately represented freedom to me," he said. "I never
felt so much at home in any other place."
Despite his affection for the sun and sand, there
isn't a single image of a beach, a trance party or
a bikini-clad European in Edge of Faith, Prabuddha
Dasgupta's elegant new book of photographs shot in
the state that has since become his home. In fact,
Hindus and Muslims are missing too, even though
they form 70 per cent of the state's population.
Instead, the veteran photographer explores the
innermost chambers of the grand Catholic-owned
houses in the territories that the Portuguese ruled
for close to four-and-a-half centuries.
The images are a result of Dasgupta's attempt to
familiarise himself with the state to which he moved in 2006.
"This is how I get to know places," he said. "I am not
doing documentary work, or trying to produce a comprehensive
portrait, or anything like that." Instead, Dasgupta became
fascinated by the customs and culture of the residents of
Catholic neighbourhoods in North Goa, where he lives in a
pretty hillside home in the village of Arpora, very near the
ocean. "I was attracted by the sense of suspended time, of
the feeling of being in a space that almost doesn't
recognise the universe outside," Dasgupta said.
When he began to take his Goa photographs, Dasgupta was
splitting his time between commercial work and the more
experimental photographs that were starting to make it onto
gallery walls in Delhi and Mumbai. He'd already achieved some
notoriety after he was arrested in 1995 for shooting an
advertising campaign for Tuff Shoes that featured Milind
Soman and Madhu Sapre in a nude embrace with a huge python
coiled around their shoulders. He continued to push the
envelope with Women in 1996, a sensitive photo book of
portraits and nude images of upper class women.
Dasgupta had studied history in college, which
drove his interest in his Goan subjects. "I became
very interested in the colonial experience that the
Goans had, which has led to a very different
decolonisation experience here," he said. He said
that because the Portuguese and British empires
were so different from each other, Goa occasionally
seems to fit incongruously into the image
independent India has of itself.
The state's singularity emerges as the central theme of
Dasgupta's elegiac suite of photographs, which is billed as a
"deeply personal portrait of the Catholic community in Goa
rarely seen before -- a portrait of a gentle and generous
people, torn between their fidelity to a history of
Portuguese faith and culture and their post-Indian identity".
The book's jacket cover tells us that these images are meant
to "capture Catholic Goa in a haunting but beautiful impasse
-- caught in a time warp between comforting nostalgia and a
doubt-ridden insecure future."
Dasgupta demonstrates an uncanny ability to win the trust of
his subjects, who opened their houses and lives to him as
though he was a family member. In the quiet recesses of
crumbling mansions, their inhabitants are revealed in
extraordinarily candid portraits of intimate settings and
concealed attitudes that are very rarely put on view for
outsiders.
These are forgotten people and abandoned places: the shell of
a house reverting to jungle, a car rusting by the roadside,
tiny old ladies lost in cavernous rooms, and always, ever
present, the dead framed behind glass, propped up on walls
that are losing their plaster. Dasgupta's eye isn't
judgemental in plain sight of so much decay and
deterioration, and there isn't a trace of condescension in
these photographs.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the
essay by William Dalrymple that prefaces this
volume. The historical passages of the essay are
excellent, but when Dalrymple strays off into
personal observation, the piece becomes
increasingly fanciful. There are many glaring
mistakes: the riverside village of Loutolim isn't
"along a lagoon edged in coconut groves" (the ocean
is actually several kilometres away), while the
well-trafficked 70 metres of laterite stairs to the
Capela do Monte in Old Goa has never been "a
kilometer-long flight of steps", let alone "a
deserted forest path frequented only by babbler
birds, peacocks and monkeys".
Dalrymple's imaginings of imprecise Christians wearing
Homburg hats and driving antique Volkswagens would be funny
if they didn't seem to carry the same Raj-era horror of
British colonials who were confounded by the blurring of
racial and cultural boundaries that took place in Goa under
the Portuguese.
Particularly upsetting is the string of slurs
against India and Indians that he places in the
mouth of the late Georgina de Figueiredo. This
formidable woman, though no votary of the
Liberation in 1961 (which she would refer
laughingly to as "the botheration") studied in
Mumbai from the age of 10, was a distinguished
advocate in independent India in the early '50s,
and was summoned home by her anxious parents just
before she could accept an offer to become India's
first female judge. After that, she never crossed
Goa's borders again. This same woman is implausibly
quoted by Dalrymple saying, among other things, "We
are completely different from Indians" and "I feel
awkward when I cross the border into India."
Dasgupta observes that even though the places and people he
photographed seemed to be self-contained, they weren't
insular or closed. He said that he encountered remarkable
openness on the part of his subjects, some of whom he met by
simply knocking on their doors and introducing himself. "Goa
is a unique place," Dasgupta said. "I could never have done
this work in the cities where people are cynical, even scared
of this kind of interaction. Over here, I was welcomed."
Edge of Faith, Seagull, Rs 1,495.
http://edgeoffaith.notlong.com
Source : Time Out Mumbai
http://www.timeoutmumbai.net/books/book_feature_details.asp?code=100
