http://www.epaperoheraldo.in/Details.aspx?id=9871&boxid=174024515&uid=&dat=12/14/2014
After the Inaugural session of the fifth anniversary edition of the Goa Arts and Literary Festival (GALF) in Panjim last week, Sagarika Ghose was asked if the free-wheeling, frank conversation she had just held with Dr. Rajmohan Gandhi could have taken in place in Delhi. Part of a series entitled Changing India, the session had discussants and audience engaged in no-hold-barred assessment of the health of Indian democracy. Ms. Ghose considered the question carefully, then replied unequivocally. “No”, she said, the public discussion held in Goa last week could not have taken place in Delhi, or anywhere else in India. The organizers of GALF (which include this writer) have received similar feedback ever since the festival’s inception in 2010. Last year, the brilliant poet, novelist and activist Meena Kandasamy wrote on her Facebook page that GALF was the only event in India where she could read her interpretations of ancient scripture and verse in public without fear. The year before, a broad delegation of starkly opposed writers and thinkers from Kashmir found themselves in dialogue with each other in a manner that, one of them later wrote, “has never happened in Srinagar, and could never have happened in any other place in the world but the unique environment fostered at this festival in Goa.” GALF has surely worked hard to create and foster a safe space for warm and unfettered open-minded dialogue, especially by focusing on Goa, the North-East, and what the dominant culture-brokers usually consider “the margins”. The uniquely homegrown, non-profit and volunteer-driven festival consistently returns to the central theme of “different ways of belonging,” an idea taken from a classic poem by Eunice de Souza, one of India’s greatest poets (and a daughter of Goa). But open-minded tolerance, and willingness to hear out and live with opposing points of view is no single event’s precinct in India’s smallest state. Instead it is a deep-seated civilizational value of the Goans that has evolved hard-won over centuries, and the central tenet of Goa’s unique, layered culture. Bakibab Borkar, yet another of India’s greatest poets with ancestral roots in Goa, believed that landscape and his native land’s great scenic beauty was “the eternal moulder” of Goan culture’s far-seeing “universality”. He wrote “tribals, Dravidians, Aryans, Assyrians and Sumerians settled in this territory though the course of several centuries but Goa’s scenic beauty humanized them all so insistently and efficiently that they amalgamated into a single society, with one common language and one cultural heritage. The kinship and co-operation forged unto them by the aesthetic impact of Goa’s rich scenery taught them the art of living in peace and friendship, and inspired them to strive for nobler ideals. If the Goan today is peace-loving, hospitable, warm, appreciative, deeply religious, high minded , and shuns violence and strife, credit mainly goes to the scenic beauty of Goa that has been perennially influencing his mind and spirit.” Beyond the landscape, there are of course several other fundamental reasons why Goa has maintained its free-thinking open-mindedness, even as much of the rest of India has become stiflingly intolerant. Relatively high levels of literacy and human development especially the status of women, a relatively progressive legal code, as well as somewhat ingrained republican values and the pluralistic print culture that were fostered during the early 20th century colonial period before Salazar clamped down all contribute. But by far the biggest reason Goa is instantly palpably different from the rest of India to every traveler who crosses the border, whether from Ratnagiri or Russia, is that the Goan everyman (and everywoman) fights to defend their cultural values, and fiercely prize live-and-let-live independence in every aspect of daily life. The widespread Goan tolerance of his and her neighbour’s differences – stark as they may be – confounds bigots, and sets awry the machinations of the same exact divisive forces that prevail just across state borders. In today’s vitiated national politics and culture, this powerful Idea of Goa stands out like a beacon, a message to the rest of the country and world that things can be different, things can be better. This is precisely the conclusion Dr. Rajmohan Gandhi came to after spending a few days in Goa - viewing thousands of pilgrims of all faiths at the Se Cathedral, and chatting with schoolchildren from Canacona at GALF - he said, “I wish and hope this spirit of Goa can spread to the rest of India.”
