Reverse Orientalism

How does someone become a Goan? I have been saying it is in goanizing of the Goans that Goa and Goans simultaneously come to be. To a Goan, his /her goanizing is the way of being-in-the-world. It is this distinct way of being-in-the-world that dynamically coproduced Goa, Goan-ness and Goans. When this dynamism weakens, we will find that Goa, Goans and Goan-ness will also come on the slope of extinction. There are very real dangers of degoanization Goa today. This is why a slogan go Goa gone seem to have come in vogue reminding of Goa, Goan and Goan-ness is on the path to elimination.

If under colonization, we had what is described as denationalization of Goa and Goans , in a post-colonial Goa, we can notice a degoanization or dilution of Goa, Goan-ness and Goans. I have difficulty with terminology denationalization when applied to what happened to Goa, Goans and Goan-ness under colonization. This does not mean that I wish to cancel what happened to what we know today as Goa , Goans and Goan-ness . This is because India was still not a nation. Denationalization, then, becomes a label for an alienation process but appears to be inadequate because there is no nation. It is suffers the prospect of denationalization without the nation .

I have deep respect and admiration for Dr. Tristao Braganza Cunha. I think he has the right thesis but wrong label for the process of alienation and self-making of Goans. His label to describe the process of alienation under colonization suffers the dialectics of purity/ pollution that is identified by the work of Luis Dupont in Homo Hierarchicus. This to me is reverse orientalism. It is exactly opposite of the process named by Edward Said as Orientalism. Orientalism was the project of the Europeans that defined the East as inferior to the West and justified its domination of the colonizer.

Dr. Braganza Cunha’s reverse orientalism mimics orientalism of the colonizer. I am afraid with humility , respect and affection to Goa’s hero, I may have to grant that it privileges what has been described as Sanskritization by M N Srinivas. Foucault can assist us to understand how Dr. Tristao Braganza Cunha of happy memory was writing the history of Present and not of the past. He in several ways reflect the anxieties and aspirations of the Present( of the then society) that he cohabited with others.

India as a nation was about to emerge as a free nation. Goa too was a colonial conglomeration as India itself was under colonization. Goa, Goan-ness and Goans emerged under colonization and flowered into what it is and is becoming today post-colonially. Hence, the term denationalization to capture the alienation process during the Portuguese colonization also de-dignify and down-grades Goan-ness and sees it as impure and denationalized.

This of course passes value judgement and sees Goa as inferior or Other India. Perhaps, the roots of Goa as Other India, that ignites the imagination of several Indians who flock to Goa and experience a way of being Other Indians undergirds our Tourism Industry. Reverse orientalism produces Goa as Other India where by Indians feel they can holiday from the regimes and rituals of purity that controls their everyday life. Thus, when on holidays , they can under dress , their women drive bikes half clad, indulge into eating and drinking that otherwise is forbidden, gamble and even go for the desires of the flesh. In recent days Calangute seemed to have become a hub of everything linked to the flesh. Hence, it is important to understand how the thesis of denationalization has constructed Goa as Other India and has come to haunt Goans, Goan-ness and Goa in our days.

Goa as polluted and polluting is feeding the tourism industry and fueling the imagination of Indians. We seem to have lost high end tourists from outside India and see high spending Indians as well as low spending Indians who crowd our beaches and other tourist places. What happened to Goa under colonization, therefore, cannot be viewed only through a reductive prism of denationalization. In order to understand this process which is complexly alienating as well as self-making of Goa, Goans and Goan-ness we need to take a different stanch.

Goa, Goans and Goan-ness are also produced under colonization at several levels. Goan self-production cannot be therefore, simply viewed as denationalization. Maybe we need Lacan’s or Zizek’s notion of point de capiton ( quilting point) to understand our distinct self-production ( Goa, Goans, and Goan-ness) under the colonial rule. We cannot engage reverse orientalism to explain our self-production. It will simply produce neocolonialism from within. We cannot also write the history of present while writing or thinking about our past.

Away from all this I think the notion of point de capiton enables us to understand our subjectivation ( self-making) collectively as well as individually. This understanding does not suffer the dialectics of purity/ pollution or reverse Orientalism which actually brings colonization again ( neo-colonization ). Lancan’s notion of point de capiton basically deals with one’s sujectivation of reality . It can enable us to understand the self-making ( subjectivation) of Goans, Goa and Goan-ness. It enables us to understand how the social, cultural and historical reality that we inhabit is internalized and experienced. It enables to understand how my experience of I am in a social world becomes comprehensible to me.

Lacan indicates that social reality that one inhabits does not simply become of something ‘in’ the reality that already provides meaning which then the self, integrates into its dynamic becoming ( goanizing in our case). This dynamic self-making for Lacan has unique individual dimension. Zizek tells us that Lacan teaches that socio-historical reality that one inhabits is like a formless morass ( Real of Lacan). It is a bit like the Child before it sees itself in the mirror and becomes through its image an ego. Thus, to the self, the quilting point or the point the capiton is like the mirror where all the signifiers that pre-exist (meanings) and slide down into a coherent and meaningful understanding of the self in the world.

To us Goa , Goan-nes and Goans becomes an unique experience of becoming humans because of the special manner our point de capition slides all signifiers into a distinct experience is unique to us both individually and collectively. This is not the same to other Indians. To them Goa, Goan-ness and Goans becomes meaningful through the quilting point or point de capiton that enables them to see Goa as Other India , that has to be subdued or dominated or brought back to India. Thus, we can see that goanizing did not happen and is not happening as anti-Indian way of being in the world. It is other way of being Indian and not anti-Indian and therefore, does not need to be brought under the feet of idealized India. In fact, that dimension ( anti-India ) was never there at the point de capiton. The floating signifiers that are existing around Goa and India has, thus, historical and colonial and post-colonial moorings and get determined differently by Goans and other Indians about Goa. Goan Self-making is not a denationalized self-making but a another mode or way of being Indian( if at all we can speak of it as such with reference to our present).

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