Transcript: Heritage, Humour and Regional Identity in Goa

Nordic Asia Podcast - “Heritage, humour and regional identity in Goa” - a conversation with Prakruti Ramesh”

 

Opener  (00:00:02)  

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

 

Kenneth Bo Nielsen  (00:00:09) 

Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic Region. My name is Kenneth Bo Nielsen. I'm a social anthropologist based in Oslo and also the coordinator of the Norwegian network for Asian Studies. I'm here today with Dr. Prakruti Ramesh who recently defended her PhD thesis titled 'Making a public aesthetic - heritage humor and regional identity in Goa' at the Department of Global Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. Central to this thesis is the illustrator, painter and artist Mario Miranda, who is arguably among Goa's best known artists and also one of India's most famous cartoonists. The author joins us today to offer insights into her work on Miranda, as well as on the broader theme of heritage, humor and regional identity in Goa. So, welcome Dr. Ramesh.

 

Prakruti Ramesh  (00:01:09) 

It's a pleasure to be here Kenneth. Thanks so much for the invite.

 

Kenneth Bo Nielsen  (00:01:13) 

When one travels to Goa one sees Miranda's drawings almost everywhere from the minute one disembarks the plane at the airport and travels onwards, they quickly become a very familiar sight to travelers in Goa. I'm curious to know what motivated you to do a full PhD on his work?

 

Prakruti Ramesh  (00:01:36) 

Yeah, there are at least a few ways to tell that story. So I'll go with one of them. I spent a part of my childhood in Goa. And when I was an adolescent around the year 2007, I attended an exhibition of Mario Miranda's work in Goa's capital city, and I found it very entertaining. I especially liked his cartoons. And I remember buying postcards with his drawings on them that I could gift to my friends in high school. My parents also have some of his cartoons and illustrations displayed in their living room. So there's a sort of intergenerational consensus in my family that Mario Miranda's work is interesting and unique. And I suppose my study is, in a way an inquiry into that part of my upbringing, which led me to find pleasure in Miranda's work. But beyond this personal dimension, I also chose to explore this subject in a PhD because, as you mentioned, Miranda's pictures are a sort of default public aesthetic in Goa, you find them in government control spaces, like the airport, railway stations, municipal markets, the State Library, and government cultural centers. You also find them in privately controlled spaces like restaurants, hotels, shopping malls, and even higher educational institutions. So I was interested in why these pictures seem to appeal to diverse sets of people in Goa, and what they communicated about the region's history and present.

 

Kenneth Bo Nielsen  (00.03.20) 

We'll return to Mario Miranda and his significance shortly. But there's another question I'd like to ask you first, one of those million dollar questions if you like. And I posed the same questions to one of our fellow Goa researchers when I did a podcast with him roughly a year ago on his book on Goa that came out at the time. And that big question; Why is a study of Goa important to wider scholarly debates about India? And I asked this question because I don't know if you agree with this, but Goa is often considered to be not really Indian. It has a very different colonial history, different historical legacy. And if we look at Goa today, it has increasingly become a place where quite many Indians travel to do some of the things they can't respectably do at home, to put it quite preliminary of course. So by implication, there's often this unspoken understanding that if you work on Goa, you're not really working on India. What would your response be to allegations of of this kind?

 

Prakruti Ramesh  (00.04.30)  

Well, I think you're right. I mean, Goa has a certain national reputation. People from other parts of India go there for their destination weddings and honeymoons and their spa retreats and rave parties, but also, as you mentioned, to do things, that their inhibitions would prevent them from doing openly at home. I think Goa is an eroticized destination and because things that are erotic are often stigmatized in contemporary India Goa also bears this stigma. For example, I went to college in a city called Chennai in South India. And when I invited my female friends to visit me in Goa, their parents would sometimes forbid it. If they didn't forbid it, they would at least express concern that their daughters would be exposed to some vaguely defined unsafe influences. These anecdotes partly reflect my caste and class background, of course, but I think it's valid to say that Goa does occupy this niche in the national imagination. There's also a sense in which I think the nation needs to project its repressed fantasies onto places like Goa, and where there's demand, there's usually supplies. So there are sectors of Goa's economy with a vested interest in keeping these ideas of Goa in circulation. What I'm trying to say is that the perception of Goa I'm referring to is ideological. By which I mean that there's only a partial correspondence between Goa's reputation and its reality. Because, of course, the state is not only composed of tourists and tourism service providers, there's a whole lot of so called ordinary commercial activity as well. People go to the fields, people go to offices, they care for their children, they go to the church, or mosque or temple. And they do go on holiday. And in that context, there's the sense that, yes, Goa is different, but in the way that every place is different. And here, I think it's important as well not to understand Portuguese colonialism only in terms of its difference from British colonialism. Scholars writing about Goa have to disentangle its objective differences from the ideology of its difference, which is, of course, not easy because all ideologies have concrete and objective implications. For example, as I mentioned, Goa reputation affects who visits the state and what they look for when they visit it. Now, you mentioned an unspoken understanding that the study of Goa is not really relevant to the study of India. And I've definitely come across that perception to I think it draws in part from the reputation I just described. Researchers are of course, not in any way immune to ideology. But to say that Goa isn't really India is sort of like saying that what people do at work is important, or not what they do when they're resting or when they're looking for fun. Or it's like saying that what people do in their living room is significant, but not what they do in their kitchen or their balcony. What I'm getting at is that Goa has developed social and economic specializations that cater significantly to national and global needs, and both of the objective and subjective kind. So if you take an integrated systemic perspective, then it's clear that the study of Goa is in fact, relevant to the study of India.

 

Kenneth Bo Nielsen  (00:08:16) 

Thank you for these very good reflections on a tricky questio. I partly also pose this question because of a personal experience I had some years back when I told a colleague of mine that I had in mind perhaps doing some anthropological work on contemporary Goa. And the response I got from him was simply 'Oh, that's a brave choice'. And what he meant was, of course, not that it required special bravery to carry out fieldwork in Goa, but that it was academically a brave choice as in perhaps a bad choice, precisely because it is so marginal in the wider field of India study. But let us return to Mario Miranda that we started out with. What does the figure of Mario Miranda represent in Goa today?

 

Prakruti Ramesh  (00:09:06) 

This is something I address in detail in my research, but I'll try to be brief here. Mario Miranda played the role of a regional ambassador, by which I mean that in his art, he represented Goa in nationally circulated publications, and he represented India in regionally circulated publications. India central government acknowledged the importance of Miranda's contributions by bestowing him with some of the highest possible civilian awards. And the state government also acknowledged his contributions by giving him prestigious awards. But more importantly by endorsing the display of his Goa related pictures in public spaces.

 

Kenneth Bo Nielsen  (00:09:52) 

What was it about Mario Miranda that made him such a suitable ambassador between region and nation?

 

Prakruti Ramesh (00:09:58) 

Well, I argue that the are two aspects of his identity that are relevant to this question. Firstly, Miranda was born in 1926 to an elite Goa and Catholic family. He was 35 years old when the Portuguese quit Goa. And when he was growing up, he was exposed to Goa catholic village life. That means that he was privy to the inner workings of the Goa catholic gentry, a class of Creole, westernized and Lusophone, that is Portuguese speaking people who occupy positions of influence within the colonial administration. This is important because a major interest of the tourism industry that has developed since Goa's liberation is was catholic culture, and more specifically, the mythologized lifestyle of the Goa catholic aristocrat. And this is a culture or a lifestyle that Mario Miranda not only had access to but also depicted in his drawings. The second factor is that Mario Miranda was located somewhere between a cultural insider to Goa and a cultural outsider. He went to Bangalore, which was then in British India for his schooling, he went to Bombay for college. And when he sought work, it was at a very large and well known publication house in Bombay called The Times of India. When he returned to Goa, it was basically for his holidays, and ultimately for his retirement. And so you can see how his perspective on Goa in some ways, anticipates that of the tourist. After all, many well off tourists today, buy holiday homes that go with the plan of eventually spending their retirement there. What's also important about Mario Miranda, his biography is that his experience as an immigrant from Goa, and later as a returning visitor to Goa was actually representative of a sizable cross section of Goa society beginning in the 19th century, and arguably continuing till today, Goan catholics with the resources to emigrate left for cities in British India. And they also went overseas to British and Portuguese colonies in Africa, basically in search of education and employment. The reason for this was that Portuguese Goa had virtually no industry. And not only was it agrarian, but by the 19th century, agricultural productivity was extremely low. So there were very few opportunities for work or even education in Goa, and that contributed to large scale emigration. What this means is that quite apart from the fact that Miranda's pictures give tourists an intimate view of Goa Catholic village life, it's also the case that his status as a visitor to go corresponded to the life experience of many emigrant guns. In the sense his pictures of Goa contributed to a diasporic and often nostalgic recall of Goa. And finally, since you asked what the figure of Mario Miranda represents today, the short answer would be to say that I think he's emblematic simultaneously of High Society, an old or a Portuguese Goa, and of merit in new order Indian Goa.

 

Kenneth Bo Nielsen  (00:13:21) 

I noticed that his work has been described by the art critic as sublty witty. This witty component, what does it do? I mean, the humor of many of these images have to do with the application to public space.

 

Prakruti Ramesh  (00:13:40) 

Well, as you mentioned, in your introduction, Kenneth, one form of art that Mario Miranda was particularly successful at was cartooning. Cartoons are different from other forms of art because they involve humor and irony, and often also elements of distortion or exaggeration. Many of the pictures that have been adapted from Miranda to public spaces in Goa are cartoons. They usually represent social scenes and character types from Goa in a humorous way. Now, when I began to research for my PhD, I thought it was very strange that so many people, including government officials, felt it was appropriate to represent NGO or society as though there was something inherently funny about it. And I was especially interested in this question because, to the best of my knowledge, the use of humor in state sponsored art is unreported in academic literature. When we think of state or statist art, we think of serious, maybe even monumental expressions, statues of national or regional leaders, memorials dedicated to soldiers lost in war. In fact, when humor is discussed in the context of public art, It is usually with reference to counter institutional and often explicitly anti state expressions such as graffiti. So, I wanted to get at some explanation for why successive state governments and Goa have promoted portrayals of Goan society that resemble caricatures. And my research led me to conclude that among the cartoons from Miranda, adapted to public spaces, the humor has a double edged quality. On the one hand, the cartoons reproduce prevailing stereotypes about Goa by poking fun at the supposed provincial reality of it society. In the sense, the pictures also function as advertisements for Goa's difference and make Goa seem like a fun place to visit. On the other hand, by owning these stereotypes, the pictures show Goans as capable of laughing at themselves, and that in some way subverts the stereotype. And what I do in my thesis is I historicize, this self stereotyping mode of humor, in the context of the relationship between a marginal colonialism that the Portuguese and South Asia has normative colonialism, which was British. And I follow the ways in which this colonial relationship is reworked into the post colonial relationship between region and nation. I make the argument that the use of humor in this form of public art is a way of expressing mixed feelings, both toward Goa's colonial past and toward the independent nation that it was, let's say uncomfortably integrated with.

 

Kenneth Bo Nielsen  (00:16:42) 

I know that one important thing that you do in your work on Miranda and his art is to not only study these images in their own right, but also observe them in public spaces, and to have conversations with Goans from different parts of the state on how they view and understand Miranda's images that one can come across ever so often. How does this set of images in Goa's public spaces help towards understanding the region more broadly?

 

Prakruti Ramesh  (00:17:16) 

Yeah, so as I mentioned, the question for me was, what are these pictures doing in public spaces? If so many people find them persuasive enough to display them, then the pictures themselves have to be communicating something that is important to communicate. But when I interviewed the people who made the choice to display the pictures, and when I tried to find out why they had made this choice, I usually received short, repetitive answers, but some kind of implicit circular reasoning. For example, people would say that they chose these pictures, because they show how Goa really is. And if I try to probe further, I will often get versions of the same answer. So the interview method would often fall short, which meant that these pictures captured the imagination in a way that could not really be articulated by a language. I think we all implicitly know this experience. When I select a piece of art to put up in my living room, I do it because it appeals to my imagination in some way. And maybe also because it corresponds to the way I see myself or would like to see myself. But if you asked me why I chose that piece of art, it's likely that I will give you a relatively trivial answer that doesn't actually capture the complexity of my choice. This may be because I'm not actually conscious of all the factors that led me to make the choice, or that there are factors that I'm conscious of, but don't want to share. But there's also a very interesting branch of studies, which explores the hypothesis that images are different from other forms of communication, and that they articulate realms of experience which don't find an equivalent in spoken or written discourse, meaning that images are able to say things that can't be put into words. So to the question of how my research deepens existing research, I would say that by examining a set of highly popular images, I'm able to look into aspects of human experience with only find adequate expression via visual media. And what I try to do in my thesis is provide both political, economic and psychosocial perspectives on why these images matter.

 

 

Kenneth Bo Nielsen  (00:19:34) 

It's interesting that you bring up the issue of the political economic in the state, I mean, you've already spoken of what the humour in Miranda's images can tell us about the more psychological effects of colonialism and the transference of these effects into a post colonial regional identity. But can you say a little more about what the use of these images tell us about Goan economy, I mean, how do they tie in with more general processes of urbanization and economic development?

 

Prakruti Ramesh  (00:20:07) 

One of the most important economic sectors to have developed in Goa since its liberation in 1961 is tourism. Now, as you know, places that want to attract, tourists have to be able to demonstrate that they have something unique to offer, something qualitatively different than other places. And as I mentioned before, a very important reason for the use of Miranda's images as a public aesthetic is that they capture complex intergenerational experiences that can't easily be articulated by other means. But aside from this reason, the pictures are also used as a way of branding or, in other words, they used to reinforce an idea of Goa's singularity. This is why the images are so widely displayed in hotels and restaurants which cater to tourists. In this regard. I think the pictures serve as reminders to tourists of the reasons why they chose to take a break from their regular lives. And as a validation that Goa offers them something that their day to day experience does not. What I try to show in my writing is that such reminders and such validation only become necessary in an environment where the real qualitative differences associated with the plays have begun to disappear. Where do real qualitative differences come from? I mean, they come from Geography. For example, specific features like hills or mountains, rivers, coasts, local forms of vegetation. They also come from human adaptations to geography and climate in the form of architecture, infrastructure, like bridges, roads, public transportation. So they come broadly from the way a society was and is organized, which impacts everything from food and clothing, language and religious expression. But what happens when a sector like tourism takes off, there's a need for hotels to accommodate tourists. And then there's a need for apartment complexes to accommodate the service workers. And then slums and shanty towns develop to house poorer sections of the working class. And then there's a need for wider roads and more highways and flyovers and airports. And meanwhile, the price of land and other resources, skyrockets, therefore incentivizing locals to sell their plots of land to real estate companies or to immigrants. There's gentrification, this demographic and cultural change. And in a matter of a few decades, the whole place becomes transformed. You have high rise buildings, but once upon a time, there were only one and two storey houses. And suddenly the tourists who arrived feel that they have not actually left home because the same urban pressures that caused them stress and fatigue at home, can be felt also in the tourist destination. So in order for the tourism sector to continue to remain in business, they have to diversify, but there are natural limits to this diversification. If the rivers are too polluted, then they have to organize cruises in the sea. And if the sea is too polluted, and the environment in general is degraded, then they may have to invest in creating simulated experiences like in museums or in casinos. And meanwhile, when these real differences are being raised through urbanization, gentrification, state and private entrepreneurs try to use images like those from Miranda's to make a claim to difference. But of course, that brings its own contradictions. Because the more Miranda's pictures are used, the more standardized they come to seem, in which case, they can no longer signify difference, and therefore, they cannot meet the objective they were originally enlisted to serve. So in my research, I contextualize the use of these images against the contradictions of urban development and more broadly capitalist growth. I don't mean to imply that this course of development is inevitable, only that it is common.

 

Kenneth Bo Nielsen  (00:24:25) 

This was very stimulating insight into images that at first sight appear very localized, but that also then, again, quite a new significance when seen through this political economy framework. And I think exactly what you described here are these long term developments and going out over quite many decades will also be equally familiar to almost anybody who travels to Goa these days. All good research produces not just good answers, but also new questions for further research. So as we move towards the conclusion of this episode, I wanted to ask you how this research project that you've worked on for quite many years now how you see this as opening up new avenues into other future research projects?

 

Prakruti Ramesh  (00:25:14) 

Yeah, I believe that this is perhaps the most important question, right? Because it's so important for connections to be drawn between research projects of all kinds and across disciplines. I mean, each question that we pose an answer can only illuminate a small portion of our reality. And so to answer your question, in abstract, I would say that I'm interested in building bridges with other research. I suppose one way I would do this is to continue to trace the contradictions that arise in the course of cause development, and then to look for how these contradictions start to interact dialectically with one another. Another way to build bridges is to bring Goa into comparative relationship with other places. This would help against this kind of the isolation of Goa in the study of India more broadly. I know that you have been doing this in your own work, for example, when you compare Goa with West Bengal, or Goa with Macau, which is a former Portuguese colony in present day China. And there's also interesting work which brings Goa into interrelationship with East Africa or with former colonies across the Indian and Atlantic ocean worlds. But I think there are a lot of good reasons to pursue interconnections in history and in marginality. With other so called peripheries. In India alone, there are resource peripheries, geostrategic peripheries, ideological peripheries, and there are frequent overlaps between these types. Goa, for example, is both a resource periphery on account of long standing mining operations, and a pleasure periphery which is a term made popular by John Ashe and Louis Turner. And Goa's history has very interesting structural affinities wirh that of Kashmir for example. So, broadly, these are the kinds of ideas that I have in mind.

 

Kenneth Bo Nielsen  (00:27:18) 

Prakruti Ramesh, thank you so much for joining us. And once more congratulations on the successful defense of your PhD:  'Making a public aesthetic - heritage, humour and regional identity in Goa', defended in Aarhus, Denmark very recently. My name is Kenneth Bo Nielsen, and thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast, showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.

 

Closer  (00:27:45) 

You have been listening to the Nordic Asia Podcast