We have a strong attitude towards our own present. Is there a history of this attitude? Can we discern this history? Michel Foucault has tried to scrutinize this critical attitude towards the present. This attitude towards the present defines our way viewing our past as well as practice of writing our history. This is why may be we have to unearth how in Goa, past is being perceived and history is being written from a privileged position of the present. We may find its genealogy.
In this postcolonial times, we seem to be held captive by an attitude that makes some of us feel that our time has come. There is a sense of triumphalism and kairological opportunism. We seem to feel moved by the time. Dark days of colonization are over. We are now on the road that has always been our own. We have a philosophy of time.
It is a period that designates itself and ourselves. It formulates its own motto and its own precept and says what we have to do and not do. The independence of India and the liberation of Goa have been the defining moments to us. No one can question the attitude that we have to the present that has come from it. It has transformed our way of being in Goa and India .
There is a philosophy of time that has emerged from these dual moments that defines our attitude to the present. Time that had lost its joint is amended. Time today has become thick. Time that was not on our side is gone. Now time is felt to be on our side and we are now falling in line with the promise of time. We are living in Messianic times.
We acutely feel that there is an order of time. This order of time pushes us to align everything with it. The order of time has an order of things. Anyone or anything that is not falling in line with the order of time appears to be disloyal and rebel. It is difficult to rebel from the imperative of the moment. It has established its distance with colonization. It has marked its distance with its Christian legacy. But have failed to determine how there are other layers of coloniality that are still continuing in our days.
In fact, this sense of time that missionizes us with a sense of triumph is not free of colonial traces. The colonizer also felt in his own hay days that his time has come or time is on his side. Like him, we too seem to be pushes by the intensity of the moment. Our present is pregnant. It is full of power. It pushes us forward . But are we losing our true self as we are tossed by the forward thrust of the moment?
We Goans have a challenge to examine how we are accelerated by the forward intensity of the moment. May be it might reveal us that our politics , economics and religion is pushed by the intensity of this moment which constructs itself in the background of our colonization while paradoxically reconstructing different shades of colonialities that keep our appointment with the order of our time.
We certainly feel that this appoint with time , moves us towards salutary and happy destiny . The rapture of colonization has been healed. Some of us think that we have debts to pay because of the aberration of colonization. Hence, these debts are thought to be extracted from the minorities who are villainized as extensions of the colonizers.
We are indeed blinded by the glitter of the moment. This alignment with the moment that is thought to push us towards our appointed destiny is a voluntary choice. Therefore, we can set ourselves free from it after a profound critical distantiation. This marking of distance is very important. It will enable us to understand how the philosophy of time that has emerged from the moment of Independence and liberation of Indian and Goa respectively is reproducing oppressive colonialities in our days.
Colonization is over but colonization of our minds continue. Hence, the distance that we have to make from the intensive pull of the present moment is timely. It will enable us to examine and evaluate push and pulls of the intensities of the present moment which is producing relations of colonialities.
This means we have to re-examine a deep sense that compels us to think that to belong to the present, we have to embrace a task , a task that pushes us to disown our own brothers and sisters on the pretext of purity/ pollution principle of the age old caste system.
Colonization had revived and mutated caste system. Casta is a Portuguese word. We do need to examine how principle of purity / pollution is redefining Goans. Some Goans are thought to be polluted for being converted to Christianity (batle). We have the imperative to examine how anything away from Hinduism is polluted. This polluted geography is defining a geometry of Hinduism. Cast is a geometry of exclusion. It has come to deeply mark postcolonial Goa.
We may agree postcolonial times has produced and sustained an attitude to the present. It is a way of thinking , feeling and acting. It is a way of being human ( only Hindu?) in Goa. Hence, we do have the challenge to free ourselves from being chained to the cave of the present. We have the challenge to break the wall of logocentrism.
We can be Goans and Indian by giving up this appoint with time that missionizes us to preproduce colonial power relations (colonialities) . This requires us to embrace an emancipative ethics. This ethics sees the past, present and future of Goa and India in the plural. It is an antidote to the ethics that flows from our attitude which sees our present, past and future in the singular. Let us critically examine how we produce, reproduce , contest and deconstruct our belonging and that of others to the present of Goa.