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Communidade de Saligao---I. This topic needs to be written keeping in mind the past history of Goa. My friend Mr. Jose Pereira from Curtorim and Professor Emeritus of Fordham University, Yonkers, New York has attempted a chronology of Goan History up to 1510.. He illuminates traditions which have been overpowered by the mass of colonial and post-colonial history says Mrs. Maria Aurora Couto in her recently published book entitled ‘Goa, a daughter’s story’. ‘According to J.Pereira’s view, the Goan population is descended from four races: the Negritos, the Proto-Australoids, the Dravidians and the Aryans. These races arrived in different stages, beginning with the Negritos in the 8th century BC from the shores of West Africa. They survive in the Andaman Islands, Malaya and Indonesia and in the Philippines but in India they were absorbed by the races that came after them. The Proto-Australoids came from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, represented among the Gauddes, the Kunbis and the Mahars, in Goa today. Sanskrit borrowed some words as did its descendant, Konkani, from their languages, some of which are still spoken in remorse places in India. Skilled in fishing and boat making, and in the use of the lunar calendar, they are also credited with the most important feature of goan tradition: the creation of village agriculture and village associations that came to be known as ganvkari or’ communidades’. The boundary of Goa from earliest times is best defined by the area of jurisdiction of its ganvkari system started by the Proto-Australoids groups. These village communities worked hard at reclaiming and maintaining agricultural land. They reclaimed marshy soils, protected khazan lands and salt works, nurtured sweet water ponds and lakes, and fruit and vegetable plantations, besides coconut groves. A system of creeks and rivulets controlled by locally made sluice gates increased the supply of fish. Indeed these creeks and rivers, which make up the waterways sought after by the contemporary tourist, are navigable for a total combined length of 270 km. They were well developed along with the jetties long before the Portuguese period and used for trade and transshipment. The Dravidians who followed the Proto-Australoid groups are supposed to have originated in the islands of the Aegean. Jose Pereira in his` Baroque Goa’ recounts that they ‘ seem to have been the most civilized of all the foreigners to arrive in India in prehistoric times…(they) were city dwellers, and indeed… have created town planning itself .They also seem to have known how to construct docks. They had scripts of their own, and later inscribed them on their palm leaf manuscripts. They conducted a non- violent type of worship, that later came to be known as` puja’, adored mother goddesses, and practiced a form of yoga. They seem to have built temples, where they worshipped their gods in the form of icons’. “Thus the Betal—Santer cult of the original inhabitants of Goa merged with the Arayan culture. The Betal-Santer cult is the original cult of the Gauddes and Kunbis. Santer is the representation of the ‘roin’(ant hill) which again is the symbolic representation of the fertility cult. Santer in Goa is represented as mother earth”. In Saligao Saravoni or Xervani( another word for Santer) in represented as mother earth with the advent of Aryans in the village.’ “Betal is the male counterpart worshipped in his nude form. This cult was later represented as the icon of the linga( phallus of Lord Shiva, the male counterpart of the female Shakti). The cult of Shantara or Shanta Durga( in Goa the goddess of peace) was brought from Trihotrapur( modern Tirhut in Bihar-Bengal or the ancient Gaud region) by the Aryan Saraswat Brahmins. The Mangesh cult brought again by the Aryan Saraswats was the Aryanized version of Santer cult. Still later, the cult of the mother goddess, was incorporated into Christianity and is still popular in Goa”(1)… to be continued. (1)COUTO, Maria Aurora,in ‘Goa a daughter,s story’, 2004,published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2004, pp 76 & 77 . Fr. Nascimento Mascarenhas, Vasco da Gama , Goa, 03/07/2004. |
