Like other tourists on their maiden visit to Goa, I too found myself queuing up in front of the entrance of the 'ancestral Goan village' in Loutolim on an ashen morning. The rain had kept most visitors away, and turned the sea a shade of steel. Two ancient women in traditional attire applied tilak on my forehead and declared that I was now welcome to visit their 'village' - a museum of life-sized dolls - that had been conceived to portray snippets of the life and times of a Goa that has now been consigned to memory by the depredations on its society and environment.
The museum itself is a confluence of myth, tacky artefacts and technology. One of the information boards declared that this land had risen when the mythical warrior, Parashuram, shot an arrow into the sea. Each installation - a panel of grinning dolls with garish faces - is meant to depict Goa's traditional occupations, food, dresses as well as local institutions. Thus, the nandu (potter) pored over his wheel; the zovinto (bangle-seller) sold his ware, a family rested inside a hut made of mud and laterite, men and women worked in salt pans or brewed feni, while a barber gave a hair-cut. A hidden microphone blared chirpy Konkani songs which declared, the tapping music nearly drowning the words, that all had been well once, even though it was evident that the men and women - farmers, fishermen, traders - had suffered feudal excesses. In one corner, stood the watchful figure of the dreaded demo, the keeper of land records.
After leaving the 'village', as I loitered marvelling at the Gothic charms of the Alvarez mansion - yet another tourist attraction for its authentic Portuguese architecture - I kept wondering about the grinning dolls. Was their mirth the result of the gullible tourist's eagerness to partake of the myth of aparanta - the expression that is commonly used to represent Goa as some sort of a timeless, pastoral, and piquantly colonial idyll?
To be fair, even an ageing Goa has remembered the tricks of seduction. The sea in Colva changed colour - from emerald green to a dazzling blue to silver and, finally, to grey - in keeping with the light on the horizon; the hills were verdant; Zuari and Mandovi, the two majestic rivers, flowed elegantly; silken roads meandered past rice fields and enchanting villas; nearly every locality - Verna, Betalbatim, Colva - had a quaint chapel; the coast was dotted with old forts, of which the Reis Magos is quite spectacular.
The sea is quiet; but not the land. While scanning the local newspapers, I pieced together a fragmented narrative that is not quite different from other Indian states on the cusp of inequitable, but rapid, transformation. Villagers in Carmona had called a crucial gram sabha meeting to decide whether they would allow the Rahejas - a real estate behemoth - to build a project that would require 88,000 square metres. The panchayat, allegedly, had been bought over by the builders, further eroding the citizens' faith in, and the legitimacy of, an institution that is usually hailed as a model of decentralized democracy. In Tiracol, villagers were protesting against a proposal to build a golf course, while the predatory navy had been served an ultimatum in Chicolna-Bogmalo for discharging sewage into a storm water drain.
In Goa, the resistance to this template of development has been organized by local communities that are asking searching questions about the impact of progress on land and environment. These communities have refused to align their agitations with political parties. Hailing from a state where people's movements have been repeatedly compromised by agencies that claim to be representatives of electoral democracy - not just in Singur but also in the Jangal Mahal - I realized that independent protest requires a specific set of preconditions to sustain itself. Two factors have played their bit in strengthening such solidarity in Goa. First, given Goa's size and population - it is a small state with a population of about 15 lakh people (Census 2011) - the scale of these agitations has remained manageable in a society which is yet to lose its intricate patchwork of interdependent caste affiliations. (Goa's experiments with the bahujan samaj, a coalition of the Bhandaris, Gaudas, Kunbis, Velips, Kharvis, Dalits and Gomantak Marathas, are receiving attention at long last.) Second, these protest movements have also received considerable support from a loose alliance of artists, writers and activists who have made Goa their home. The networks between the facilitators and the protesters are fluid but tangible. This makes it difficult for the State-Corporation nexus to infiltrate and weaken the movements. But the ethics of the representatives of democratic institutions, as is evident from Carmona's anger with the local panchayat, remain vulnerable to greed. It is a pity that the long history of community agitation in Goa remains inaccessible to visitors interested in obtaining a holistic understanding of the state and the questions that confront it at the moment.
The other, equally unrepresented domain, pertains to immigration. Goan migration to Europe and the Middle East is well-documented. Portugal recognizes Goans (and their offspring) born before 1961 - the year it gave up its colony - as citizens. Between 2008 and 2013, 11,500 Goans had surrendered their Indian passports in favour of Portuguese nationality. But the experiences of those who have filled the social vacuum - migrants from other states who have flocked to Goa in search of a better life - remain largely undocumented. This imbalance, I was told during a chat with an author of some repute who has lived in the state, was the result of the media and commentators expending their energies on the unfolding of fractious relationships between Catholics and Hindus on the one hand and those favourably inclined towards Goa's colonial past and their opponents on the other. The migrants' story has disappeared through these cracks that have appeared on Goan soil.
In tiny Colva, a sleepy suburb that has been transformed into a tourist hub, I met people from Bengal, Assam, Nagaland, Maharashtra and Karnataka working as cooks, drivers, yoga instructors and lowly helping hands in hotels and beach shacks. None of them, however, talked about the subterranean tension that exists between residents and migrants. Their assertion of successful assimilation is not shorn of agenda. The relationship between the dependent and the native employer - albeit a thinning population - is usually one of convenience. Pejorative expressions about settlers or workers from outside the state are not unheard of. But the cheap labour provided by the migrants forms the key to tolerance. In return, the immigrant, usually a resident of a poorer state, is assured of better returns for his/her labour. The ruse, mutually beneficial to the stake-holders, works perfectly.
As visitors, our unwillingness to observe, infer and learn about the lands we visit all-too-briefly reinforces the differences between the ancient traveller and the modern tourist. The lethargy of the latter is complemented by agencies - the tourism department, for instance - that want citizens to see what the State deems fit for public consumption. The affluent, but apathetic, visitor making way for the informed citizen would bring with it a latent threat in the eyes of elected dispensations.
A little more than a week could never be enough to form a deeper understanding of the other Goa and its vast complexities. The only option available to me was to turn my attention to art and literature as a means of comprehending what has been stowed away. An exhibition of Goa's much-loved cartoonist, Mario Miranda, had been organized in a gallery inside Fort Reis Magos. Witty and perceptive, Miranda documents Goa's journey with dollops of irony, but his works are considered to be nostalgic - even benign - in comparison to those of Loretti Joyce Pinto, Ramdas Gadekar or Kedar Dhondu, who explore contentious ideas such as modernity, urbanism, mining, deforestation, pollution, migration. Each of these themes has a particular relevance in Goa. I was shown several elegantly designed brochures that are supposed to inform tourists about the beaches, churches, restaurants, casinos and a few museums. Unsurprisingly, none of them mentioned the locations of galleries - I hope there are some - where one could see the creations of trenchant artists.
One can keep out troublesome artists from the public discourse. But not Goa's earth-moving machines, which, I discovered on the internet, have featured in Pinto's paintings. These machines are synonymous with the ravages of mining in Goa. I saw one on the highway to Old Goa. The machine stood glistening in the morning light, its giant arm with claws waiting to be brought to life.
