How to dream the xit-coddi dream in the Konkan city-state

by Rahul Goswami

The comunidade system provided Goan society a discipline. Now it is all but defunct, as is the once-robust citizen action movement. What will counter the seductions of globalization in Goa?

There's no escaping the uncomfortable truth. Once India's most charmingly agitationist tree-shepherds and ramponkar-friendly joneiros spoiling to kick out industry, Goans have today become enthusiastic euro-chasing free-marketeers. The stout spirit and community strength that kept the Konkan Railway issue aboil for two years, that evicted corporate hoodlums in the form of the Thapar-Du Pont nylon tyrecord project, that stopped Japanese golf course merchants before they even left Osaka, has all but evaporated. Where have all the true and angry Goenkars gone? How have they been so cleverly enlisted by the konsum-temple that is India?

Retreat a step to the late seventies and early eighties. The Goa that welcomed the flower power cohort was everything the angst-ridden violence-riddled West was not, was everything the viagra virility of early twenty-first century India is not. Thirty years ago the technology fixes for civilisation that the West was exporting used the metaphor and practice of consumption as its medium, just as urban India does today.

For the Goenkars then, over-consumption was evil, sustainable living was what they unconsciously, happily, practiced. For the global free radicals of the sixties and seventies, this was like a pre-ordained synergy, for conspicuous abstention was their mantra too.

They wanted less noise in their lives. They wanted design whose form served function beautifully. They wanted homes with a spare, modern aesthetic and the health and sustainability benefits of green building. They found a host culture proud with its make-do and mend, waste not-want not mentality. Most of all, they found that host culture maintained a strong connection between the things they bought and the lives they lead, who recognised that sometimes the best thing to buy was, simply, nothing.

Sustainability has been an essential component of the Goan approach to living systems for as long as its histories record. Through the waxing and waning of empires redolent with decay, their chronicles punctuated by skulduggery, valour and deceit, the comunidades survived and prospered and were understood seminally in 1526.

For that year, the Comptroller of the Treasury, Afonso Mexia, compiled the famous Foral dos usos e costumes dos Gancares e Lavradores. Mexia laboriously codified the fundamentals of the gaonkari system, and remained patiently diligent with the colourful variations in village chapter and verse.

In the first article of his Foral he sets out the origin of the village council, as he learnt it from his contemporaries:
"In ancient times four men set about cultivating an island.
They tried the same on another, barren though it was, and succeeded so well that people flocked to it and called the first settlers 'ganvkars' because of their excellent government, administration and harvest..."

Each word of the legend need not be taken ad pedem litterae, Joseph Velinkar tells us, but the whole story does afford an insight into the manner and motives that went into the origin of the comunidade system in Goa.

To today call the 223 comunidades of Goa moribund is to be both correct and sombre. Most of these are financially bankrupt; indeed they have been inexorably dragged into a designed penury.

In the velhas conquistas, I am told, there is not one comunidade remaining which can still proudly claim that the zonn (birthright to the 'dividend' from the common surplus) it distributes accrues entirely from agriculture, as it has done for centuries before us. Those which continue to survive in the novas conquistas are being systematically weakened by the state and its proxies, and then raided for their lands, on which industrial estates have been built (and on which, now, 'info-tech parks', 'food parks' and similar monstrosities are planned).

The cynical dismantling of the comunidades has been one of Goa's unseen tragedies, for it signals the almost complete divorce of a society from its socio-agro-economic fundamentals. Once upon a time, the comunidade was supreme, sovereign and self-sustaining.

But Goa and its Goans -- not only the Fernandeses, Prabhudessais, Braganzas and Kamats, but also the Bhattacharjees, Reddys, Smiths, Menons and Patels -- have agreed tacitly to a steady abdication of their roles as citizens, gaonkars, residents, protectors of our tambdi maati and orchards and khazans.

They have like their more urbanised counterparts in metropolitan India been won over by the lurid tinsel and Bollywood dhamaka that surrounds the philistine process that is Indian globalisation. It was perhaps to be expected, given the gathering strength of Brand India. But why here?

Ziauddin Sardar reminds us that "in formulating a response to Islam and the discoveries, the West learned more and developed more of its own self-image than it did of the specific orient it constructed..." and therein perhaps lies a clue. Our urban Indias -- Goa's amongst them -- have turned obsessive with the image they feel they must possess, and forget therefore to formulate a response to the massive changes in social and cultural fabric that globalisation brings in its wake. Even so, the speed of Goa's seduction by the forces of liberalisation has been as breath-taking as its consequences are alarming.

In the 50s, we are told by those who were there, a popular Konknni saying was "Sodd firangi bhas, haddank urta mas", which meant at the time, 'too many Portuguese speeches do not help to fill the belly': a refreshing view, particularly when seen against the Luso-tropicalisme that was said to be prevalent in Goa at the time.

Would that such a typically practical Goan admonishment be applied to the mis-development gripping the state today, for it is far more dangerous than any 'firangi bhas'. Much of this perversion of the Goan praxis of community, eco-system and dharma lies with the role of growth in modern society.

India's obsession with growth appears to be a fetish -- that is, an inanimate object worshipped for its apparent magical powers. Economic growth purports to be a very ordinary idea, no more than an increase in the volume of goods and services produced each year. But closer analysis reveals that it abounds in metaphysical subtleties and theological paraphernalia.

Why and how does this abomination of an idea get in the way of Goan-ness? Like a retrovirus, the growth fetish attacks as its primary target the idea of governance (which is very different from government).

To elaborate an apparently simple notion -- for mis-democracy and mis-government in Goa went beyond farce years ago and are now in the realm of crimes
against social justice -- government means the formal institutions of state control, while governance refers to relations between the state and other institutions, including private business and civil society. It represents the relationship between the government and the governed, encompassing issues of accountability and
empowerment, particularly of those normally marginalised.

Goa thus has a government but abysmal governance. This is the result of some of the riskiest gambling citizenry in India have collectively taken, and the virtual absence of governance is the fault almost entirely of the Goan, not of the government of the day, no matter how benighted it is.

That we Goans are cynically dealt out an info-tech policy, a bio-tech policy, a special economic zone policy, but have no tourism policy, no human development roadmap, nor even reliable waste management illustrates how governance as a concept and ideal have been utterly junked.

This is a loss, a shame in many more ways than the regime of the day can imagine, for a peri-urban region such as Goa can be an excellent place in which to live -- ecologically sound, socially dynamic, culturally lively and academically exciting.

Goa is none of these today. It is increasingly displaying the stark economic and social disparities, with extremes of wealth and poverty that have long marked out metropolitan India as a homogenous zone of no-governance.

Here too, the urban glamour zone has fine restaurants, state-of-the-art office buildings, residences with facilities one finds in plush condominiums. The glamour zone is about 20 per cent in Bombay, Hyderabad and Bangalore but the glamour zone in any city needs cleaners, service workers and nannies.

Most of these people live in the same city but in another world altogether. P Sebastian, a human-rights lawyer in Mumbai, explained how these two worlds do not collide: "If you ask the rich where their servants stay, they will say they do not know. But they do know. They won't say, because it is the rich who create the slums they deplore.... They will not pay enough for people to afford decent housing."

The slums that surround cities -- more usually cheek-by-jowl with the richer areas -- are always overcrowded, and often lack the most basic services. How many slums are there in Goa ('notified' or otherwise), how many shanties, nascent slum towns, satellite slums, random 'jhopdies'? How many live in them? We shall never know, for slum populations are often deliberately and sometimes massively undercounted.

The Census data tells us that in Goa, two cities/towns report slums, that the total urban population of the state is
670,577 and that the population (together) of the two urban centres reporting slums is 175,536 persons. This is an example of under-reporting of an issue. Which are the two urban centres? Margao and Panaji? Mapusa and Vasco? What of Ponda? And where do the industrial estates and their shadow regions of labour fit in?

The Census data and addenda which is publicly available do not elaborate. Still, some data is better than none. Hence we are also given some useful ratios. The percentage of Goa's slum population to its total urban population is 2.2 while that of the slum population to the combined population of the urban centres reporting slums is 8.3, both ratios being well below the India averages which are 15 and 23.1 per cent respectively.

Yet this is only part of the story. Post-industrial Goa (was it industrial ever? The Goa Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Goa Small Industries Association and its Economic Development Corporation will tie themselves in knots in attempting to answer) needs to be understood within a complex logic, linking global and neo-cultural processes, regional and counter-cultural influences.

To begin, our focus must swivel towards the state's neo-Goans, partly-resident Goans, tourists of indeterminate visa status and other administrative desiderata. For they
(we) are our cross-cultural residents who shape our shared destiny.

There is a section of new settlers, long-stayers, returned Goenkars, who have chosen Goa as a residence in order to follow an aesthetic 'style of life' rather than the usual economic-centred motivations of many migrants. Often they've sought to step away from -- and out of -- the conventional, oppressive boredom of 'mainstream' society, with its stress, conditioning, and demands.

In them, I believe, is the kernel of a new understanding of our public spaces, our commons, a contemporary understanding of our policies and sociologies, and an occasionally activist and always constructive contribution to re-engineering the interconnected spaces we call Goa. This is because a large segment of this cosmopolitan populace are products of differing nationalities (genetic and adopted), hold dual citizenship, with polyglot children often speaking multiple languages.

Having lived elsewhere (in India, Asia, planet-wide) many regard Goa as a special reference in their lives and subscribe to a new doctrine of the 'assimilados'. Paradoxically, despite fleeing the mainstream, Goa's hypnotic image places these self-marginalised people at the very centre of its creative life, and they feed cultural core groups that craft much of the state's seductive charm. Who are these cosmopolitan types? They are luxury traders, therapists, healers, yoga teachers,
fashion professionals, DJs, musicians, party-promoters, drug dealers, rich bohemians and rebel rastafarai.

Many of them are as sanguine in Mapusa's Friday market as they are in the mandis of old Hyderabad, the leather tanneries of Calcutta or the atolls of Lakshadweep.

In them, this state will realise unconsciously the competitive edge it is tutored to seek, for Brand India is bristling with states vying amongst each other to attract foreign direct investment.

How this is realised however will depend to a significant degree on the tone and tenor of civil society (yes, those very same groups who once flung cow dung at airplanes disgorging Goa's first chartered tourists). Here too, a decline in both form and effect has taken place, and I posit that this is simultaneous with the dismantling of the gaunkari system, for the one fuelled the other.

Voluntary groups in Goa (in India/South Asia too) no longer grasp intuitively the dominant mechanisms or schema of social production and social ordering. Thus this decline is balanced (from the point of view of government) by the rise of a new form of control, which is the dominant role of finance, of financing, or return-on-investment as tools of liberalisation.

The discipline of the comunidade system -- its institutions that reached into the agricultural, clan, community, religio-social -- has waned and where it once served as the skeleton or backbone of civil society, it is now in crisis.

What is left by the withdrawal of such groups (the instinct that once spawned groups of epistolary nomenclature such as the All Goa Citizens' Committee for Social Justice and
Action) is the cold logic of capitalist production perfected in the factory, and which now invests all forms of social production. Social space is being emptied of social institutions, and state-sponsored quasi-technological elements (read 'IT park' or 'service sector' or 'business process outsourcing') is taking its place.

Our state still stands at a turning point and its citizens and visitors, administrators and activists, gaonkars and potekars must halt their workaday pursuits to examine what lies ahead.

The seductions of broadband, of the cult of the automobile, of the faux glitter of info-tech and the false shimmer of showbiz, of the 24/7 shopping mall (with valet parking) and the buy-one-get-one-free deal must be examined critically and discarded. These are not Goa, do not deserve to be. The growth fetish must be seen for what it is -- it takes the form of its universal equivalent, money income, and represents dangerously more in the ability to consume.

The obsession to increase income has become the very object of life in modern society, in which all the hopes and schemes of men and women are invested. Indeed, increasing income has become pivotal to the creation and reproduction of self in modern society.

Thus growth takes on significance not because it multiplies the pile of goods and services available for consumption but because of the titillation it produces, the promise of bliss it holds, just as spurious and just as empty as the proliferation of religious movements in the Papua and New Guinea of the thirties and forties with their predictions of an imminent new age of plenty. These came to be known as the 'cargo cults', for the cargos to be consumed appeared almost miraculously thanks to the devices of colonialism.

We cannot afford to linger over such deadly opiate.

Gaonkars traditional and modern, Goans ethnic and adopted, are the heirs of a living chain of traditional communities throughout India, the product of a long and deep symbiosis with their natural local environment. Any attempt to destroy or distort the densely woven texture of our root cultures through the tools and inducements of globalisation must inevitably lead to disease and death of our commons, our society. We can no longer sanction our own demise.

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RAHUL GOSWAMI is a writer and editor living in Goa. He has recently worked with community groups in India's North-East, and with development news organisations in South-East Asia.
Earlier, he was a journalist with the business and general interest press in India. He has edited and reported for publications like Business Standard, The Sunday Observer, and Business India.