The new Babel

PANAJI: In a small café on the backwaters of the Mandovi River, we sit and watch the sunset paint the water and the mangroves with the spiritual hues of colour: magenta and crimson, purple and black. It feels almost like a high mass in an awe-inspiring cathedral. Quiet time for the congregation, but the birds don’t seem to get the message: swallows, gulls and other avian creatures zoom in and out of the mangroves with sharp cries and the sound of fluttering wings.

 

As we sit munching on calamari, washing it down with an ice-cold King’s Pilsner, an old Gujarati phrase bobs in my mind. The best translation is captured in Indian English: “What a fine!” I say it out  loud to no one in particular. Though it might sound gauche in literary circles, the statement was more than an appreciation of the tableau; it expressed gratitude for being able to partake of the scenic beauty on display. On that backwater that evening, we all truly felt that we were one with nature; more important, we felt blessed to enjoy such simple pleasures.

 

Goa spreads through your system like a mood-elevating balm. This is why those who call it home get upset that people from all over India, seeking a getaway from an increasingly frenetic lifestyle, end up making the place more and more like the rest of the country. Huge and expensive housing estates, power cuts, traffic chaos and crony capitalism have all made their appearance in Goa. To take just one of these odious developments: the activities of a large company that sells a national brand lager beer are creating problems for local brands like King’s Pilsner. At one liquor store in Mapusa, I watched agape as a customer knocked over a crate of the national brand beer. Most of the bottles were broken, but the owner did not demand payment from the offender. When I asked him why: he said it would cost him nothing to replace the crate.

 

Local politicians and fixers are complicit in this still-nascent, perhaps unwitting, effort to subvert the Goan way of life. Granted, Goa does need a dose of India’s red-hot economic growth; granted also that this state has lacked in opportunities, causing a huge migration to other parts of India and overseas. Not many would, however, agree that granting monopoly rights to robber barons is the way to go. The citizens’ groups that have come up to challenge the sell-out have raised popular concerns about unregulated construction and environmental degradation. Their ire was expressed strongly enough for the government to back off from promulgating an ill-advised master plan that would have released vast areas of virgin land to developers and builders and destroyed the very fabric of this haven’s society and culture.

 

Never to be kept down for long, the politicians and fixers are back again; this time they are playing with the divisive issue of language. The ruling Congress Party has urged the government to introduce a bill that grants official status to Marathi, and to Konkani, written in the Roman script. Currently, Konkani written in the Devnagari script is the official language. Local opinion holds that in proposing the bill, the Congress has sought to curry favour with fundamentalist groups. The Marathi chauvinist movement is an old one, but has now been bolstered with the support of Hindu fundamentalists. Likewise, supporters of the Roman Konkani script have been around since the days of the Portuguese.

 

What’s new is that it has been taken away from the elitism of the old Goan-Portuguese class and the chauvinism of the Marathi-speaking minority. On the side of Roman Konkani are now the emergent born-again Catholic zealots, who are increasingly evident even in the mainstream churches. On the other hand, Marathi supporters now include Hindu fundamentalists. The incompetent Congress government, it seems, has neither the will nor ability to take a firm stand against such divisiveness. 

 

The new language proposal appears to have its origins in the Congress Party’s endemic factionalism and the opposition’s desperate search for an electoral issue. It is as though all political parties wish to divert voters’ attention  from Goa’s unregulated growth.   Builders defy the law in some places; in others, tourists, especially from Russia and Israel, have established beach colonies that thrive on drugs and sex.

 

So another election will pass, with fixers determining the outcome. Today it is a Congress government; yesterday the BJP held office. The game goes on…

 

Email: rdesai@comma.in