No culture speaks ex-cathedra but does so within the babble of plural voices. When culture is viewed as sedimented tradition often it is viewed as an essence of a nation. Under such condition often we enter what may be called the dictatorship of ignorance where vibrant dynamism of the culture is often cancelled and we enter what is called cancel culture that takes upon the job of becoming culture or identity police.
Culture does have subversive traits but when its plural dynamism is cancelled it takes shape of violence that puts on the mask of self-preservation. Thus, openness and generosity embedded into culture is closed and culture is then weaponized to fight and settle political scores. This loss of cultural dynamic pluralism is real. Yet we can see several people have found ways of resisting such cultural degeneration.
The self-critical cultures are indeed vibrant and humane while a culture that is self-righteous becomes blind, and militantly tradition-centric. Self-critical culture has deconstruction embedded within it and has mechanism of regulating, checking and eliminating oppression and unjust cultural structures that often operate as cultural forces. Hence, it is important to critically examine the social habits that put up a mask of innocence of being rooted within what is deemed as sacred or pure culture. Such social habits are naturalized, normalized and even considered morally acceptable. Hence, our tolerance of what is blatantly morally questionable actions is heightened. This is because culture that is sacralized numbs our moral sensitivities.
While this efforts are to transform culture into an emancipative force is a continuous struggle, there is need to also make conscious effort to resist some forces that may use culture as a mask to achieve their political goals. We can see such a vibrancy and thirst for building emancipative space is visible in Goan culture.
We have to credit the people of Goa for successfully decolonizing the Portuguese culture even while the Portuguese were ruling Goa and this decolonization continues even in our days. To understand this decolonial cultural dynamism, we may need to think with postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha. Homi Bhabha has introduced the notion of the third space theorized by Edward Soja in his famous book, Post-geographies.
It is in the third space where the Goans critically negotiated the colonial influence on their lives and culture. It is in this their space colonial imposition of culture is resisted and decolonized. It is the third space where the Goan people resisted colonization by what feminist Luce Irrigaray descried as mimesis. It is not simple mimicry where by the Goan simply and blindly accepted the colonial culture. It was critically absorbed so that the response becomes hybridized resistance. This is how Goans mediated life under colonization.
It was not just the great freedom fighters that resisted colonizers but all Goans also resisted them through mimetic hybridization. This response is not certainly a conservative communitarianism that returns to a mythic and normalizing community of purity that is felt as pre-Portuguese given-ness nor it is an exhausted liberalism that is rooted in individual self. To me it is a distinct dissensus with a profound ethics. Hence, we may view it an ethics of dissensus.
Ethics is first and is opposed to the politics of dissensus in Goa. As an ethics of dissensus, it is different because it does not aspire to set up prescriptive norms that are supposed to be followed by all. It produces a disposition, a habitus of dissensus that when embraced by all turns into consensus. It therefore has become the ethos of becoming Goan. Being Goan is thus, decolonial.
Goan-ness of course was a response to the colonization of Portuguese which was different colonization as compared to British colonization and a tilt of innocence and playfulness is attached to it. Goans invented what we call Goan-ness under colonization and enabled it grew under post-colonization. This ethics of dissensus can be viewed as Goan consensus. it is not simply an ethics of selfcare but one that respects the otherness of the other. Indeed, tourism in Goa that developed in the early years of 1960s was based on this openness and welcoming spirit of otherness in Goa.
Goan dissensus with the colonial other was not one of negativity or direct antagonism. It is one that led to the invention of third space where each Goans could come is the public with great respect for otherness as well as live happy and content life as private individuals. We can, therefore , trace a measure of de-centered ex-centricities and transgressive tendencies alongside deep respect to otherness deeply embedded in Goan-ness. There is a performative excess to Goan-ness and its tolerance limits to all shades of otherness are great.
Within this performative excess the responsibility for the other, the poor, the women, the child etc can be seen in Goa life. Goans have appropriated Lusitanian aesthetics that includes cuisine, music, dress etc. This stays at the external level. Goans have not followed the ethics of the colonizer. Hence, Goan-ness may be viewed as an ethic of dissensus. Distinctly Goan ethics of dissensus is a synoptic vision that disposes Goans to goanize themselves and Goa.
Goan-ness in its playful dynamism stays always open and in the mode of becoming. It is decolonizing with a difference. It does not demand any return to some pristine precolonial past or culture/ faith but stays open to learn its lessons from the wound of colonization as well as stays open to avoid its indic mimicry in the social and political life. Dissensus for Goans is not politics. As a politics , it can bring about ‘an us and them’ divide of Carl Schmitt version of the political. In Goa the political is first the ethical . It informs the joy of being a Goans all the way from life to death.
