Jason Keith Fernandes, an aspiring member of the cloistered academic world wrote a polemic not just ridiculing and condemning the perspectives of two historians informed by their reading of recorded history of Portuguese colonialism in Goa, but by psychoanalyzing their unstated intentions, and launching a blatant casteist attack against one of them. Gerald Fernandes has now poured more scorn on them by calling them senile.
In my opinion, Jason Keith has as much right to share his perspective as Dr. Damodar Sardesai or Dr. Teotonio de Souza. But neither he nor they deserve to be made a target of a casteist attack, smeared, psychoanalyzed or used as yet another opportunity for caste-baiting. If he wants to revise colonial history, and claim that forced religious conversions led to the elimination of the caste system, and thereby uplifted the Goan masses, he can do so without abusing a historian whom he believes does not share his self-righteous perspective. After all, wouldn't he want to be different from, and more scholarly and intellectually honest in the cloistered academic world, than the brahmanical Hindu revisionists who deny the Aryan invasion theory? Cheers, Santosh Gerald Fernandes wrote referring to my earlier comment in the subject line: > >The article written by Jason came as a fresh change of direction in the >>cloistered academic world which is wont to go by previously published >>opinions which grip the mind of senile academics having an eye on the pie >in >the sky. > >The perspective shared by Jason needs to be examined for its >>relevace,validity and reliability in interpreting the way people perceived >>the world then , and people perceiving the world now. > >Lets not ridicule or condemn the author. After all he has something >>important/alternative to express. > >Gerry
