Beyond beaches: Couto's essays on Goa's complex cultural identity

Maria Aurora Couto's last book is an elegy for a more inclusive Goa, and confronts its modern challenges, such as corruption

At Home in Two Worlds: Essays on Goa

Author: Maria Aurora Couto

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

Pages: 214

Price: Rs 499

  My earliest impressions of Goa are etched with images of colourful caricatures personifying life there by the famous Mario Miranda, who belonged to the coastal state. The country’s quintessential Sunshine State, Goa has over a period of time become a kind of escape from reality for millions of Indians. With idyllic palm-fringed beaches, exotic casinos and tropical climate, it’s the hedonistic paradise, particularly for those residing in congested metropolitan cities. When we first took our (then) five-year old daughter for a vacation to Goa, she fell head over heels in love with it. As we jumped the waves and ate delectable meals at beachside shacks every day, she incredulously asked us why we did not live in Goa. No wonder that so many people permanently moved to Goa during the pandemic, and continued living there long after it was over. And the fact that it has become de rigueur for the rich and  upper middle-class to own luxurious second homes in Goa comes as no surprise.

 

Renowned Goan writer and cultural critic Maria Aurora Couto’s posthumously published book, At Home in Two Worlds: Essays on Goa,  attempts to deconstruct the myth about Goa. By tracing its complex history, unique culture, language, religion, and social change over the decades, the book offers a comprehensive set of writings on the state’s evolution – “its glorious yet turbulent past, its vexed present, its precarious future.” Both as an objective outsider and passionate insider, Couto began writing the book in 2017 and completed it just before she died in 2022. The book is a fitting third part of a trilogy by the author that began with  Goa: A Daughter’s Story  (2004) and was followed by Filomena’s Journeys: A portrait of a marriage, a family & a culture  (2013).

 

Born in Goa, Couto was brought up in Dharwad in Karnataka, where she became well-versed in Konkani, Marathi and Kannada, alongside Catholic and Hindu communities. As an academic and the wife of an IAS officer, she later moved to Patna, Delhi, Chennai and London before finally returning to her husband’s ancestral village, Aldona, in Goa. Keeping Goa’s stereotypes aside, the insightful essays in the collection explore among other things the state’s centuries-old global connections, anti-colonial resistance and its traditional gaunkari system of community welfare (a self-governing system based on the collective ownership of land by a group of villagers). Along the way, Couto also shares viewpoints of well-known visitors to the state over the years, such as British writer and journalist Graham Greene, Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, Indian polymath D D Kosambi, poet Bakibab Borkar and sociologist Alito Siqueira.

 

“The book serves as an elegy for an older and more inclusive Goa, recognising its religious complexity and its role as the Panchayati Raj of Gandhiji’s dream while confronting the modern Goa, its corruption, and the destruction of much that was good or, arguably, great,” explains Vivek Couto, the author’s son, in the Foreword. The book also highlights other little-known facts about the state, such as being the place where Asia’s first printing press arrived in 1556 AD. “While the Portuguese cultural influence is undoubtedly the strongest in Goa, there are also influences from the Kadamba, Vijayanagara, and Bahmani periods, and from across the seas when Govapuri was a busy trading centre,” explains Couto. Goa is also the only state in India with a Uniform Civil Code, which ensures women equal rights of succession, property and inheritance, informs the author. Further, despite its violent past in the early decades of Portuguese colonisation, Goa has been held up as an example of communal harmony, she points out.

 

Khushwant Singh once wrote, “Goa is the place to go if you do not wish to travel to Europe.” Given that more than half the land in Goa today is owned by non-Goans, architect and urban planner Charles Correa remarked that just enough landscape remains in Goa to mop up all the excess black money sloshing around in urban India. Couto adds that the tragedy of Goa is that its distinctive history has now become its liability. “Goa can develop as it likes within the framework of India and thus add to its richness,” wrote Nehru about Goa’s distinctive personality when he visited the state in 1963. Moreover, Couto talks at length about the difference of Goa, which has led to a popular perception of the Goan as the “other”, marginalising the population from the cultural matrix of India. “These perceptions project Goa as a haven for the pleasure-seeking moneyed class, though the scale constantly tips to include more of the middle classes,” she writes.

 

“On the one hand, Goa must confront turbulent processes of social change within. On the other, the state must navigate its irreversible assimilation into an India rife with conflicts based on the polarisation, indeed the dangerous weaponisation, of religious, ethnic, caste and gender differences,” Ranjit Hoskote writes in the book’s Introduction. It is heartening to know that in recent years, many entrepreneurs are contributing to Goa’s community and redefining it beyond its reputation as a mere holiday destination. “As these citizen-led grassroots movements inspire hope, we must also preserve Goa’s secularity, tolerance and pride in tradition and heritage,” she concludes.

 

The reviewer is a freelance writer based in New Delhi. She writes on books, art, culture, travel, music and theatre