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2008 International Goan Convention
Toronto, Canada
Early Bird Discount Registration closes March 31, 2008
http://www.2008goanconvention.com/regform_print.html
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The Hindu, 24 March 2008
Deconstructing tourism image of Goa
Maria Aurora Couto
The recent tragedy in Goa exposes degradation of coastline and
human resource.
The immense media focus on young Scarlette Keeling’s death has
exposed the degradation that has seeped into the fabric of Goan
society, predominantly along the coastal belt in north Goa.
However, her tragic death only points to a disease that has
afflicted Goa for more than a decade. It is to be hoped that the
sequence of developments will expose a nexus of perpetrators who
have raped the pristine beaches, and lured a significant section
of the youth into drugs. It is a disease spread through the very
construction of the image of Goa as a tourist paradise, a party
place, Goa-where-anything-goes. And the pickings have been rich
for the powerful, their underlings and the middlemen spread across
the globe, within the nation and of course within Goa.
Historically there has been an image of Goa and Goans constructed
by British historians and travellers such as Richard Burton in the
19th century. They despised the failure of Portuguese colonialism
and hence despised Goan culture — of which they knew nothing. They
created the stereotype of a mixed race, of temple dancers, women
of easy virtue, hard drinkers, a people with no history and no
culture. This stereotype has been reworked in our time by Nirad C.
Chaudhuri and V.S. Naipaul, and in Bollywood films. Yet we Goans
know we are by and large a law-abiding society, with strong family
values. The temples and churches are overflowing, the festivals
are celebrated with a typically Goan combination of élan and deep
spirituality, and our village life is vibrant and active.
Writers and artists have chosen to make Goa their home. Amitav
Ghosh, who now has a home in Goa, feels it is the special quality
of the Goan people, their warmth and cosmopolitanism, that draws
people here.
Contradictory perspectives
How, then, does one make sense of these two contradictory
perspectives? What is of concern to me is that the image of Goa
constructed to sell tourism has been sedulously cultivated to
reinvent for modern times the perverted stereotype constructed
since the 19th century or earlier. The notoriety, the quiet wink
and knowing look that have been inseparable from the idea of Goa
in certain circles, appears to have been co-opted to sell tourism
with a kind of tacit understanding that much will be condoned. And
these same forces collude to keep the party going, to ignore the
crimes, and the despair of a law-abiding population that finds
itself trapped between a description of its homeland as one of the
best States in the country in terms of human resource development
yet also is host to paedophiles, drug pushers, and most recently,
gambling, to lure yet another kind of tourist, a State with a high
rate of literacy second only to Kerala yet with a 40 per cent
dropout rate, and an equal percentage of the educated unemployed.
I lived in Goa in 1962 soon after its liberation when people
flocked from our metropolitan cities to buy foreign goods and
cheap liquor. Goa itself was not taken seriously except as a place
to have a good time. The scene is no better today. There is a
sense in which the national tourist ‘others’ the Goan. We are an
open society, cosmopolitan, with fewer inhibitions in the sense
that we are informal, love music and dance, with time for leisure
built into a hardworking day. And perhaps more crucially, there is
an easy informality between the sexes, which is wildly
misunderstood by the Indian tourist, in particular, who often
arrives to let go of his own inhibitions, drawn by the media image
of “in Goa anything goes.”
Figures show that the consumption of liquor by tourists in a day
in the high season is more than is consumed by Goans in a whole
year — although drunkenness is now disrupting family life more
than ever before.
Goa has suffered many shocks which have rocked the stability of
its society, which is essentially feudal, and its ancient system
of land-holding known as communidade. Both received a mortal blow
from insensitive land reforms. As a result, rich agricultural
lands are lying fallow — and a great deal of it has been converted
by unscrupulous politicians into settlement zones. Hence there has
been a huge diversion of agricultural land to satisfy the greed of
national and international players for real estate. One reads of a
sale in Delhi earlier this month at an “Extensive Goa Property
Show.” Goans know nothing about this, nor do they know to whom the
land belongs. Simultaneously, a signature campaign is
