In Goa today, two conversations about the past seem to move in opposite directions. Many Goan Catholics live their faith quietly, without daily reference to the Inquisition that ran from 1560 to 1812. At the same time, a section of society speaks publicly, and often with urgency, about ancestral pain from that same period, claiming a continuity of victimhood into the present. Neither stance is invented. Both are human. To understand them without condemning either, we can turn to insights from postcolonial theory, which studies how empire, memory, and identity work long after formal colonial rule ends. The aim here is not to rank sufferings, but to see why memory behaves differently for different people in the same land.
Postcolonial thinkers remind us that colonialism did not only take land and wealth. It also reorganized the inner life of peoples their sense of self, their stories, their silences. Frantz Fanon wrote of how the colonized person is asked to wear a mask, to live in a world defined by the colonizer’s categories. Homi Bhabha spoke of hybridity: after centuries of encounter, identities are no longer pure. They are mixed, negotiated, lived in the “third space” between what was and what was imposed. Gayatri Spivak asked whether the “subaltern” can speak whether those most wounded by history have the language, the platform, and the permission to tell their story without it being reshaped by others. These ideas do not belong only to universities. They help us read the streets of Panjim and the villages of Salcete.
Consider first the Goan Catholics who do not regularly invoke the Inquisition. Postcolonial theory would call this the work of hybridity. After fifteen generations, Catholicism in Goa is not an external garment. It is a mother tongue of the soul. The faith arrived with Portuguese power, and for some families it arrived with coercion although individual freedom before the birth of Descarte’s subject in Goa at that time complicated the matter. Over centuries faith was indigenized through Konkani hymns, mandos, the ros ceremony, devotion to St. Francis Xavier, and the architecture of village feasts. The same families that may have lost ancestral kuldevtas also buried their dead in church cemeteries for four hundred years, named their children after saints, and found in the Church the only school available. Memory, then, did not remain fixed on the moment of rupture. It moved. Bhabha’s “third space” is precisely this: a life lived not in the pure past of pre-Portuguese Goa, nor in the pure project of Portuguese Goa, but in a new, negotiated Goan Catholic reality where Goan-ness was crafted. For many, to keep returning to the Inquisition would be to deny the authenticity of the life they have actually lived. Forgetting, in this case, is not betrayal. It is the way hybridity survives. It is the choice to be rooted in the present without being chained to the worst moment of origin.
There is also the matter of agency. Spivak’s question can the subaltern speak? has a hidden corollary: sometimes the subaltern chooses not to speak. Speaking requires a listener, a language, and a reason. For generations, the Goan Catholic villager had none of these. The colonial Church may have been interested in recording victim narratives. The post-colonial Indian state was interested in integration, and not in opening religious wounds. And the family itself often preferred susegad, a contentment that avoids endless agitation. In that context, silence was not consent to erasure. It was a strategy. It allowed children to go to school without shame, to marry without stigma, to pray without politics. Postcolonial scholars call this “strategic forgetting.” It is not amnesia. It is the decision that dignity today does not require rehearsing humiliation of yesterday. The pain was not denied; it was carried privately, and then laid down so that the next generation could walk lighter.
Now look at the other phenomenon: a section of society today actively remembers, documents, and claims the identity of victim of the Inquisition. Postcolonial theory does not dismiss this as fabrication. It sees it as part of what happens after empire. Edward Said showed how the past is not a dead object. It is a field of contestation in the present. Once the political order changes as it did in Goa in 1961, and again as India’s own public culture changed in recent decades new voices find space. People who felt their history was absent from textbooks, sermons, or public monuments begin to write it. This is what Said called “writing back.” It is the effort to place one’s story into the national narrative, to be seen. For some, the Inquisition becomes a symbol not only of 1560, but of a longer pattern of being culturally overlooked. The claim of victimhood is thus not only about the past. It is about present recognition.
Fanon helps us further. He argued that when the colonized are denied full humanity, they may seize upon injury as proof of selfhood. If the world will not respect you for your work, your art, or your present, it may at least respect you for your wound. This is ressentiment a moralized anger born of humiliation. In a postcolonial society where many groups compete for resources, visibility, and moral status, past injury can become a kind of currency. The one who was hurt longest or deepest claims attention. This is not cynicism; it is the logic of a world that taught people that to be noticed, one must be either powerful or wounded. So the remembering of the Inquisition today is not a simple archaeological act. It is a contemporary act of identity-making, performed in the language of rights, media, and democracy that did not exist in 1700.
Both processes forgetting and remembering are postcolonial. Both were shaped by empire, and both are responses to it. The Goan Catholic who does not speak of the Inquisition is living the hybridity empire produced. The person who does speak of it is living the “writing back” empire provoked. To call one authentic and the other false is to miss the point. Empires fracture memory. Decolonization does not restore one clean story. It releases many stories, some quiet, some loud.
So what is the way forward for Goa? Postcolonial theory does not give policy, but it gives posture. First, it asks us to drop the idea of a pure past. There is no untouched pre-Portuguese Goa to return to, just as there is no guiltless Portuguese Goa to defend. We all live in the after. We face the after life of colonization. Second, it asks us to hear speech and silence as equally meaningful. The Catholic who says nothing about the Inquisition is not necessarily ignorant or co-opted; He/she may be living a hard-won peace. The person who speaks of it is not necessarily divisive; he may be asking for a fuller table. Third, it asks us to beware of using old pain to create new hierarchies. If victimhood becomes the only passport to dignity, we will manufacture victims forever. Fanon warned that the colonized, once free, must not become new colonizers of each other through moral comparison.
In Borim, in Margao, in Panjim, the ethical task is the same: to hold two truths without letting them become weapons. The Inquisition happened, and it was contrary to the Gospel. The Church has acknowledged this. The Catholic faith in Goa also became, over centuries, a genuine home for millions, a source of schools, art, and charity. Those who forgot did so to live. Those who remember do so to be whole. Both are children of the same land.
Perhaps Goa’s gift to the “age of anger” is to show that memory and forgetting are not enemies. They are twin forms of survival. The waters of Zuari and Mandovi are flowing for the living, not to erase the dead, but because the dead, once mourned, would want the living to eat, to marry, to sing. The postcolonial condition is not about choosing between wound and peace. It is about finding a language where a wound can be named without becoming an identity, and where peace does not require amnesia. If we can speak of 1560 without imprisoning 2026, and if we can live 2026 without disrespecting 1560, then Goa will have done what theory alone cannot: it will have turned history into neighbourliness. And that, in the end, is the only decolonization that lasts.
