Who is the one who invited the Portuguese to Goa? Does he has the burden of history? Where is he hiding? Why are we creating villains out the victims of colonization today? If colonization was the darkest era of Goa, if it was a time of denationalization then those who invited the Portuguese cannot be forgotten.
No Ideology calls itself as ideology. It is always the other that is caught in the ideology. It is time that we Goans come to terms with our history. It is time that we embrace all shades of history. We cannot embrace history to suit our politics today. It does not mean that Goa does not know that the invitation to Portuguese was bigger then, the invitation to the so-called inquisition or the conversion of some Goans that is haunting us . But somehow, we have to live as if we do not know about this invitation. We have to act as if this moment of history never came. Even the so called right-wing that carries its nationalism on its sleeves also forgets it.
We are society that is numbed and we live a disavowal of the terrible invitation that is thought to have brought great doom to Goa and Goans. But we have the challenge to think about this inauspicious non-event that produced Goa, Goans and our Goan history. This non-event refuses die. This non-event is at the heart of what we call Goa today. Several among us do not wisht to identify. In fact there is a positive effort that want us to forget it .
But this so called non-event will haunt Goa and Goans always. The silence of the event is also textual. History seems to forget the villain in chief oF Goa. Maybe it is deliberate. We seem to be challenged to live the silence of the lambs. May be it is the caste hegemony that wishes to erase it . The event that made the history of Goa and that of country seems to exist in a vacuum of amnesia. Indeed, the event that went on to create Goa, Goaness and Goans is disowned, orphaned and kept under the veil. Goan society appears to be actively exhaling its own foundation event. No one needs to be a wizard to do this socio-diagonistics. We seem to have a ‘flawed hero’ who is an intimate enemy of the past and in the interest of the upper caste we cannot take his name in vain.
It has become the law of the father. We cannot name him without displeasing an upper caste in Goa. That community seems to desire to repress or even erase his memory. We seem to enjoy the surplus repression of his memory. Rival of his memory can bring about a symbolic castration of some of us. This is why perhaps, the dominant community that wishes to extinguish and erase his memory, nurtures a surplus enjoyment by constructing the minorities as the reason of all their ills. It is through this surplus enjoyment that seems that this community seeks to castrate the symbolic universe of the minorities (like attack on St. Francis Xavier) and thus, repress the memory of the destroyer in chief of what we know as Goa today.
We need to address this neurotic structure of our society. We need to deal with the foreclosure imposed on our society. The rhetoric and the discourse of the evil nature of the Portuguese rule is accepted But one who invited the Portuguese fully cannot go scot free though there is a forced foreclosure of the memory of the flawed hero of Goa. But why are we to foreclose the memory of the one who invited the Portuguese to Goa? What will happen if we open this foreclosed memory? Will time lose its joint if we remember the one who gave the ghostly invitation?
Who wants to keep Goan society fixated on the anal stage of Sigmund Freud? Who wants us to expel, abject and exorcise the dark memory of the fallen hero of Goa? The erasure of the memory of the fallen hero perhaps makes it necessary for both multiplication and projection of the fallen hero on the minority community. Hence, we perhaps need to invoke the letter of St. Francis Xavier that invited the inquisition to forget the mother of all invitations that is at the heart of very history of Goa.
To castrate or disable the generating power of the destroyer in chief of Goa, may be or just may be we have to remember how those that fear its consequences set in a politics of symbolic castration of the minorities in Goa desire to keep the true villain of history out of our memory. The first betrayal, the original sin of Goa, is repeated from time to time. It appears that it is only through this symbolic repetitions on the body politic of the minority in Goa , that the upper caste invents its innocence and like the Roman Pilot of the time of Jesus washes its hands. Hence, the challenge to us is to de-Oedipalize.
We cannot continue to Oedipalize at the altar of the law of the father. We have to let the anti-Oedipus in us stand up and name the destroyer in chief of Goa. This naming can free Goa of its past as well as present. It is can surely change our politics. When the unsaid and the unsayable of Goa’s past is let lose, Goa will heal itself. Otherwise, we will bleed each other to thousand cuts. This means we have the challenge to embrace the dark moment which is the very foundation of our history.
The silenced subaltern in Goa has to speak and call the name of the one who brought Portuguese to Goa as well as the names of those who benefited (the six families) from the Portuguese. This does not mean that we have to reproduce the betrayal of the betrayers of Goa. Neither we have to mimic the politics of the Portuguese, which is unfortunately reproduced in form by the right-wing in Goa.
We have to forgive our past and its villains. We have to embrace the past in the plural. This forgiveness will open us to the present and future in the plural. Remembering and forgiving is the way ahead. As long as we choose to forget the racker in chief of Goa, we will continue to shift the blame and set in a chain of abuse that will continue to haunt our society and the violence of scapegoating will grow.
