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THE COMPOSITE CULTURE OF GOA

Maria Couto

In the last four decades since its integration into the Indian Union on 19 December 1961, Goa has found a place in the imagination of the nation and indeed the world. However, manipulation of images of the state to promote tourism misrepresents its people. Popular perceptions miss its essence of a composite culture that enriches the life of Goans and contributes to the unique humanism of this society.

The Goan once lived an amphibian existence—he travelled by canoe and then across dense forests and rough terrain inland. Never more than 55 km from the sea, the Western Ghats form a well-defined eastern border for Goa. All of Goa’s rivers rise here and wind their way westwards to the Arabian Sea that adjoins the Indian Ocean. With a total area of 3701 sq km, it is the smallest state of the Indian Union—a narrow strip of earth (105 km long and 65 km wide) of panoramic beauty, still palpable despite urban sprawl and industrial growth.

The Mughals called Surat their ‘blessed port’ when they were not calling it ‘the door to the house of God’, writes Ashin Das Gupta. For Goans, the house of God is in the mud of their homeland and in its waters. And from these flows music. Indeed! Land in Goa does not have an existence independent of the water. Its ripples and waves conceal as much as they reveal the layers of history, enriched by encounters with the great religions of the world. However, bald classification on the basis of religion does not do justice to the complex and multi-layered identity of Goa—layers of caste, education, language, history, yearnings, dreams and aspirations. For the Goan, it is his village, its air and the soil, its rivers, forests, birds, trees and stones, which embody the spirit of the place. It is personified in the deities in the prayer rooms and altars in homes, sacred groves and shrines, the tulsi in the garden and the roadside cross, and in churches and temples. These have sustained and perpetuated Goa through a series of empires, the most traumatic and searing being the early and final stages of Portuguese rule.

Goa has long been a contested political space, layered with arrivals and departures, victory and defeat, colonisers and settlers. Its landscape of paddy and palm, an apparently limitless expanse of the whitest sand and red laterite earth captivated and calmed the wayfarer, traveller, or nomad whose quest could have been the pasture or homeland. Goan history preceding 1510 and the arrival of Afonso de Albuquerque, who conquered Goa for the Portuguese, is of a peaceful, agrarian society ruled by neighbouring kingdoms and dynasties—Hindu and Muslim—who traded and warred among themselves. Goans paid taxes demanded by the victor and were left in peace. Long before the Portuguese colonisation left its imprint, a succession of empires of the Indian matrix—from the Ashokan Mauryas to the Rashtrakutas and the Muslim Bahmanis—had contributed to Goan history and culture.

When the territory was a part of the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar and the site of the capital of the Kadambas, its interaction with the eastern shores of Arabia and the Emirates, and trade with the vast hinterland of peninsular India and Western Europe, gave Goa its enduring identity of an entrepôt culture. Bahmani rule enhanced this interchange and Portuguese presence further increased coastal trade in the later sixteenth century, particularly between Gujarat and Goa, extending connection into the China Seas and Japan. There are a few Goan families with a long history of pre-Portuguese trading power. Their sagas have been reinforced by recent studies of trade in the Indian Ocean, which reveal that the bulk of the trade was in Indian hands. The composite culture of today then, born of the civilisational traditions of India, has been enriched by the many influences of this history. The arrival of Vasco da Gama on the Indian shores ushered in elements of a new world, which interacted with the vibrant tradition that existed.

All through the centuries, Goa evolved harmoniously. Goans adapted and assimilated the influences of their animist, Brahminical, Buddhist and Jain heritage. The bedrock of the home, the village and its deities was laid in the vigorous republicanism of the traditional Buddhist village, celebrated for its internal autonomy. This characteristic was the strength of the gaunkari /communidade, commune system started by the Proto-Astroloid groups of which the historian D. D. Kosambi has written evocatively. These village communities worked hard at maintaining agricultural land by reclaiming saline soils. They 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 while sustaining the most productive paddy fields.

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 jetties and used for trade and trans-shipment long before the Portuguese period. These ancient traditions merged with Christianity and European influences after the processes of conversion, transforming Western Christianity with elements of an Indian religious experience. However, just as interior India with its many villages remained distinct from other areas of trade and administration, Goan villages along the coastal belt, with interactions along the Indian Ocean and beyond, reveal the greatest extent of cultural interaction. They are also the best developed in agriculture.

The Gauddes, who belong to the Munda section of the Astroloid race, were the first settlers in Goa, and are traditionally believed to have brought crops. Today, agriculture is their main occupation. They are supposed to have migrated from Southeast Asia into Assam, Orissa, Bengal, Kerala, the Malabar and Goa. Though it is not clear when they migrated to Goa, it is certain that they were the first to settle in Goa even before the Dravidians and the Aryans. The mythical creation of Goa ascribed to Parashuram can be rationally explained as the journey made by gifted agriculturists who descended from north India in search of fertile land. They travelled from the western slopes of peninsular India to Goa’s tidal estuarine sea face, and it is believed that it is these settlers who perfected the skill of reclaiming land through an intricate system of bunds and sluice gates to add vigour and productivity to the famous khazan lands of the gauddes Goa. The khazans are the saline flood plains in Goa’s tidal estuaries, below sea level at high tide. This was the Goa that traded with distant kingdoms and made way for an exchange with other civilisations, and the course of its own history. Skilled labour and the dazzling beauty of the landscape gave birth to refinement and grace.

Traditions of worship merged and a synthesis was born despite the rough passage of conversions and the Inquisition during the early phase of Portuguese colonisation. The Betal-Santer cult, the original cult of the Gauddes and Kunbis, merged with the cult of Shantara or Shanta Durga (in Goa, the goddess of peace) brought from Trihotrapur (modern Tirhut in Bihar-Bengal or the ancient Gaud region) by the Aryan Saraswat Brahmins. Still later, the cult of the mother goddess was incorporated into Christianity in particular, in the worship of Our Lady of Miracles (Nossa Senhora de Milagres) at Mapusa. This transformation of the goddess Santeri is the most prominent manifestation of cultural assimilation. The concept of the mother goddess has prevailed in Goa since prehistoric times as the cult of Saptamatrukas, or the seven sisters, or the seven mother goddesses. They are Lairai known as Saibin of Shirgao, Meerabai also known as Milagres Saibin of Mapusa, Morjai of Morjim, Mhalsa of Mardol, Mhamai of Mahem and Kelbai of Mulgao, and Adadeepa, and a lone brother, Khetoba.

Her origins, according to legend, go back to pre-Dravidian times; she was the earth goddess and her shrine was the ant-hill. Later, with Dravidian and Aryan influences that brought in the building of temples in wood and stone, when the builders became her mahajans—who led wave after wave of immigrants, variously on record in rival Puranas—most of them took the liberty to install her under the name of their favourite devi. Thus, she was renamed Shanta Durga, Vijaya Durga, Nava Durga. But all bear witness to only Santeri Mai.

Barring only two shrines outside Goa (and these are in the neighbouring state of Karnataka, it is only in Goa that Santeri in various transformations is worshipped, signifying her special attributes of peace, fertility and protection which Goa is proud to give as its special contribution to the Indian tradition. She provided the bridge between the Hindu and Christian traditions, and became either in herself, or in her sister, Saibin Mai, the Virgin Mary of Christians. The union of both traditions is illustrated by the ritual performed for the Milagres Saibin, Our Lady of Miracles, in the Church of Saint Jerome at Mapusa, capital of the North Goa District. The church was built in 1594 near the ruins of the famous temple of Santeri. The two communities come together at the traditional feast of the Milagres Saibin, usually celebrated in the third week of Easter. Both Hindus and Catholics assemble in large numbers to venerate, offer oil and candles. A special day is reserved for Hindu worshippers, and an offering of a barrel—couso—of oil comes from Saibin of Shirgao. Reciprocally, offerings of a basket of mogra flowers go from Milagres Saibin to Saibin of Shirgao at festival time. Christianity in Goa was sustained by its adaptation and conformity with the Indian tradition.

Unable to control the converts’ continued adherence to old customs and rituals, which they practised clandestinely, the church authorities devised a shrewd rationale which would appeal to the populace: Hindu religious rites and symbols were assimilated with Christian ones; the many festivals of the Hindu calendar were translated into feasts of Christian saints and Catholic liturgical celebrations. A connection was established between life cycle events and rites performed in church so that traditional social and religious needs were drawn into the ambit of the new religion.

Folk songs sung by Catholics record ancestral customs and re-live in memory a shared tradition. For example, women sing of the practice of prostrating before God, of Monday as a special day for prayer, the beating of the drum that signals the festivities at a wedding; they recall the custom of weaving wreaths of flowers in the hair with a special mention of the sweet smelling auspicious champak; of going round the sacred tulsi in prayer. In addition to major feasts linked with the Christian calendar, such as Christmas and Good Friday, Goans celebrate festivals such as the Feast of St. Joao in June to herald the monsoon, and the commencement of the agricultural cycle. These dovetail into the agricultural cycle of ancestral tradition. The peak festive season begins with the successful commencing of the agricultural activity.

Feasts and festivals have a special flavour in the riverine life of some of the villages. The Feast of St. Joao celebrated on 24 June was earlier called Zavn’iachem Fest, or the Feast of the sons-in-law. It coincides with a period in the Hindu calendar when a newly married girl is brought back to her parental home, and marital relations restored when her husband comes to take her back. The monsoon season appears to be inauspicious even to conceive new life. The Catholic celebration has adopted this practice in its own way: the newly married couple is invited to the home of the girl’s parents; the sons-in-law of the village wear a crown of leaves and are taken to the well where they are dared to jump in. In fact, villagers assemble near wells, ponds, fountains and rivers to watch the revelers jump into the water with drums and cymbals heralding the feats as the procession wends its way through the village sometimes ending at the riverside where young men wearing wreaths race each other in gaily decorated boats. There are myths and explanations for this celebration. One of them relates to St. John jumping in joy in his mother’s womb—symbolised by the well.

Fishing communities, both Hindu and Catholic, celebrate sangodd, at various times when the deity is taken in a procession along the river. Two boats are tied together with a plank or logs of wood between them. On 29 June, observed as the feast of St. Peter, a fisherman, a cross or the statue of St Peter, is placed on the wooden plank in canoes which float along the river accompanied by music. An identical procession is organised among fishing communities during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival when idols of the elephant-god Ganesha are placed on the wooden plank. These festivals involve the whole community and participation is a joyous affair. These floats, it is believed, commemorate the flight of the sacred idols across rivers to safety during the most repressive years of the conversion process. Idols of the deity are similarly taken on a boat ride in temple tanks on the eve of zatra.

Patron saints of village churches and chapels bind the community in a continuous tradition, determined by the agricultural calendar with celebrations that retain many of its social and ritual practices. Community life carries on as a process of work and worship governed by the landscape in which we live. Although patterns of employment and family life have changed dramatically over the last half-century, yet the pattern of worship regulated by the agricultural cycle continues. Tribal communities in some areas of Goa, whether Hindu or Catholic, observe rituals that are common to both. All communities irrespective of caste and religion, join in the five-day zatrotsav of Shree Shantadurga Kunkolikarin at Fatorpa, so called because the deity was transported from Cuncolim to Fatorpa during religious repressions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Prayers at the zagor festival in other parts of Goa have a Christian invocation, in which Hindu villagers join with great devotion and the traditional mand is in a Christian home. There are innumerable occasions when Goan Catholics pray to their original deities, the kuldevta or the gramdevta of ancestral memory at auspicious times and in times of need. Equally, the Hindu community embraces the Virgin Mother, or Saibin Mai into a devotion to the mother goddess. Such synthesis is particularly visible in rural communities, and in those close to the soil, whose ancestors struggled to retain their sense of self when traditional rituals and customs were banned.

The centuries of interaction influenced architecture and life styles. ‘Post-fifteenth century,’ writes the historian Jose Pereira, ‘India opened herself to an even more extended style, one that encompassed all the continents of the globe, a style that sought to recover the glory of imperial Rome (and hence identified as neo-Roman). The monuments of the new style were raised in the Rome of the Tropics, Goa.’ Apart from monumental churches and, later, the grand mansions of Portuguese fidalgos, and later still, the sprawling villas of the landed Goan gentry, the most striking feature of the Goan landscape is the common man’s home. His garden with mango, cashew, jackfruit, guava, chickoo, banana and papaya, the auspicious abolim and the perfumed mogra is indeed a living environment of great beauty. Although there are only a few examples of domestic architecture before the eighteenth century which have been well preserved, a tour of Goan villages illustrates the passage of history with houses that blend the urban and the rural civilisation, culture and the wilderness of nature, indeed the sense of a continuing narrative—a story that has evolved in time. The perfection of agricultural techniques of ancient times is balanced by the lay out of the village.

Goans resolved the ebb and flow of troubled times in their music. The music of Goa is in the traditional mould of sangeeta, the comprehensive art of singing, of playing instruments and dancing. The word itself gives primacy to geeta, singing followed by instrumental music and then dance. Essentially melodic, rhythmic and linear, as opposed to harmony and polyphony which was developed in the West, Goan music has enlarged with elements of counterpoint to bring in the disparate influence of colonialism and conversion. These were resolved in an astonishing harmony that nullified the decrees of the Inquisition against traditional music.

The resolution of opposites is the function of myth and language, but when both are constrained, the saviour is music. In Western music, opposites are resolved through the musical flow of the fugue, which was adopted in Goa and merged with the traditional form of music. Claude Lévi-Strauss writes of the fugue in Myth and Meaning as the true-to-life representation of the working of some specific myths. The story could have two characters or groups of characters in which ‘one group is trying to flee and to escape from the other group of characters, so you have a chase of one group by the other, sometimes group A rejoining group B, sometimes group B escaping, all as in a fugue … It could be a conflict between the powers above and the powers below, the sky and the earth, or the sun and subterranean powers … The mythic solution of conjugation is very similar in structure to the chords which resolve and end the musical piece, for they offer a conjugation of extremes, which for once, and at last are being reunited.’

Goan musicality not only maintained the tradition but enlarged it by sublimating the experience of conversion and colonialism. It also overflowed, encompassing life, both social and political. The transition was from religion as a ritual to religion as celebrated in the proscribed and suppressed mother tongue of Konkani, and then to what is commonly called secular. It is more apt to use the traditional European term of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—profane music—with its expression of social and political dissent and freedom. Harmony is so intrinsic to music in Goa that few are aware that our traditional song such as the ovi is monophonic. It was sung as a nuptial chant at life-cycle rituals presaging and celebrating birth, and as a dirge in a society where mourning even today takes on the dark and dour aspect of Medieval Christianity. However, it had its lighter side when composed to thank someone for favours, to reply to insults, or as a weapon of ridicule.

The pre-eminent creation of this marriage of Goan tradition and sensibility, and Western harmony, the wit of the Konkani language and the soulfulness of Latin influence is the mando—born precisely at the moment when gentrification, social ambition and political awareness of the Christian elite gave birth to a home grown culture in the nineteenth century. The upper classes who absorbed Western influences transformed their food habits and dress, their forms of celebration and their music. Their most creative utterance, the mando, was sung in Konkani to celebrate courtly love, reminiscent of the troubadour both in style and panache.

The world of the mando evokes the enjoyment of leisure, a gracious life and romance. Compositions are passionate and lyrical. Melody flows as if wrung from the heart. However, the dulpod in a faster beat, which follows the mando, is less stylised. It vibrates with life as lived in all its vitality, exuberance and colour. Since these are folk songs and ditties, they vary and are often improvisations. Some of the best improvisations are songs known as cantaran of the tiatr, which is a direct transmutation of the pre-Portuguese zagor. It is a stylised form of theatre influenced by Italian opera and the French revue with an episodic structure that includes elements of drama, music, comedy and improvisation—the last being a source of inspired wit. Orchestration is as important as dialogue. Despite unmistakable Western influence in harmonisation, the lilt and the melody springs from Goa.

Indeed the spontaneity of Goan response to music, the ability to burst into song or dance, the open-hearted conviviality and innate courtesy strikes those who visit the state. However, some of these qualities are often misconstrued to be an absence of moral restraints. Goan society—exposed much before colonisation to cultures other than their own, and, within India, the first to be influenced by the West—has an unmistakable air, an élan and spirit that has been made a selling point for tourism. Singing, social dancing, social drinking come naturally to the Goan because of the centuries of Western influence, but in the early years after Liberation, misconceptions about the Goan ethos were formed and then reinforced by the arrival of the flower children with drugs.

Goan music and the spirit of its people are an expression of composite culture and communal harmony as it presents the best fusion of Christian and Hindu traditions of music. Although the Hindu community did not participate in the intense musical tradition of Catholic society, it has in the last century been exposed to harmony through the rhythms of Hindi film music created by the Goan diaspora in Mumbai. Taking their own tradition from Goa, which uniquely brings together the Western and Eastern forms of music, Goan musicians made their presence felt in the 1940s and transformed the music of Hindi films. There was a time when no sound could be produced without them given their talent for spontaneous harmonisation and their expertise in notation, which was taught in Goan parish schools since the sixteenth century. With this tradition of training in Western music, Goans found themselves since the late nineteenth century playing in royal courts and army cantonments throughout India, and in jazz clubs in Calcutta (Kolkata) and Bombay (Mumbai).

Music composers in the Bombay film industry discovered that Goans could transform the unilinear structure of ragas into orchestration for massed instruments which could move the audience. Naresh Fernandes who has written extensively on the Goan influence on Hindi film music writes: ‘Goan Catholic arrangers worked with Hindu music composers and Muslim lyricists in an era of intense creativity that would soon come to be recognised as the golden age of Hindi film song. They gave Bollywood music its promiscuous charm, slipping in slivers of Dixieland stomp, Portuguese fados, Ellingtonesque doodles, cha cha cha, and Bach themes.’ The untrammeled vigour of Goan music transcended political boundaries and became the totem of the Goan diaspora from Mumbai to Dubai. It illustrates the Goan’s capacity to absorb and accommodate, which indeed began with the sublimation of the experience of conversion through music to give birth to harmony and self-realisation.

More than three-quarters of Goa does not exist in public perception except for those who come from all over the country to worship at ancestral temples. Folk traditions have been absorbed but need to be further explored. Our vibrant little traditions need to be safeguarded within the continuum of the pluralist way of life which sustained ancestral harmony. Separate religious paths were harmonised in a distinctive faith and identity rooted in the soil and culture of Goa.