Given that past of Goa has always been a site of conflict, it might be important to study how silence works within the scholarship on Goa especially when it comes to its colonial rapture Caste, religion, Ganvkaria conversion and temples have become sites that inhabit a living past. It would be interesting to understand how caste has evolved and metamorphized over time . Even religion has evolved to our times and undergone a sea change. Here we focus on the temples and examine how what we understand as temple has evolved and transformed in our time. Temple is a sacred place of worship of our Hindu brothers and sisters. Here this refection does not talk about the living temples our people but only tries to understand how the very notion of the temple that we imagine today is already highly developed and is different from the one at the time of colonization. We cannot study temples in isolation from caste, conversion and religion. They cross each other. We still have temples that do not allow lower castes to enter the holy of holies of the upper caste temples in Goa .
The temple history is also full of silences and have to be taken with a grain of salt. Temples in Goa have been both social, religious and political places. Even today they as sites of a wounded past and are politically milked by several forces. We seem to have forgotten the narrative of the emergence, spread and institutionalization of the temples in Goa and work with largely homogenized positivist notion of temple as a well as the past of these temples. Claim over the temple has be a major power assertion in the past. Hence, the silencing of the past serves power and produces a history on the side of the power elite. It is, therefore, important to understand the temporality of the notion of a temple. Temple today and temple in the colonial era and even before that time are was not same although the term or signifier is same. Its meaning, social, political economy and religious significance or signified has changed. Hence, the history of the temples in Goa remains to be written. The present temple has at least two transitory stages. The first being Gramdevta temples and the other being Kull-devta temples. it appears that the Gramdevta temples that housed a deity that belonged to the entire village evolved into a kull-devta and got almost privatized to particular clan.
When we view temple through a positivist lens , we fix its meaning and arrest its temporality. This means we black box and delink it from Gavkaria , religion, conversion and caste. It makes us think that notion of temple stands outside time and then it’s journey into time is views as fall from high. This is Platonic way of viewing. The silencing of the temporality of the notion of temple has led to the domination of the temples by the upper castes as well as rendered these sacred spaces as sites of production of power. This is why it seems to be difficult to discern how the temples are spaces for religious identity production or caste assertion. Past operates in all societies. Power elite often shapes that past to suit its vested interest. But vested interest silence several pasts and produce power and to a large extend invent history.
Perhaps we need a critical way lens that enable us to look at the silences produced by positivists notion of temples. It might enable us to view governments allotment of a budgetary allocation to rebuilt. It will also manifest that there appears that a deliberate effort is made to convert the temple of the past into sights of conflict and assertion of political Hindutva. My be we have to look at the Sancaole conflict in the same light and discern its political teeth. The rapture of colonization is used as a cover to produce a narration of history that forgets how the past is linked to the temporality of caste, Ganvkaria, conversion as well as the shifting of deities to new sites that were not under the control of the Portuguese . Erasing these entrenched links has craftily silenced a past and produced a history and its victims and villians . The missing links or fragments have produced a narration of the past has several silences and the present effort to convert temples into sites of political contestation is not innocent. There is no question of running away from the disruptive past. We can embrace all shades of the past. Erasure of the past and selective spacing together of the wounds of past to manufacture political capital also mimics the divisive imperialism of the colonizer.
