Why Another “-ology”?
Every field begins with a small embarrassment. Someone notices that existing words cannot say what they have seen. This paper begins there. I propose a field I will call Goanology, and I want to be clear from the first page about what it is not. It is not a celebration of Goa, nor a lament for it, nor another regional history in which a coast is decorated with dates. It is a way of reading. Its subject is a particular kind of historical event: the moment when a word stays exactly where it was while the world inside it moves out.
Most of us are trained to ask how meaning is made. Who coined the term, which text first used it, how a concept travelled and took root. That is a necessary question, and deconstruction has taught us to ask it with unusual suspicion. But there is a second question that gets less attention. What happens when a meaning is unmade? What happens when a sign survives and the thing it once carried does not? We walk past such words every day. They look healthy, but they are hollow, like a coconut shell that still rattles after the kernel has gone.
Goa is an unusually good place to study this hollowing. Few regions of South Asia have been so thoroughly renamed, re-categorised and re-administered, over so long a period and by so many hands: the Kadambas, the sultanates, Vijayanagara, the Portuguese (450 years), and by the Indian Union. Words have been asked to do new work here, again and again, and they have done it without changing their sound and spelling.
Goanology, as I imagine it, is the patient study of that work.
1 I will do four things in this paper. First, I explain the method I am calling anasemic analysis and how it departs from the traditions it borrows from. Second, I show it at work on five cases: the “discovery” of the sea-route to India, caste, the village community (communidade, gaunkari), the word “Hinduism,” and, more provocatively, the deletion of voters from electoral rolls. The intent is academic and does not want to hurt anyone. Third, I state the cautions the method needs. Finally, I sketch what a field built on it might do inviting scholars to inhabit the same.
A Word Before the Word: What Anasemy Means Here
The vocabulary comes from the verbarium of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, two Hungarian-born analysts who worked in Paris, and it comes by way of Jacques Derrida, who wrote one of the most striking readings of their work. Abraham coined anasemia for a movement that runs against the usual current of interpretation. Ordinary interpretation proceeds from sign to sense. Anasemia goes back toward the conditions out of which sense became possible at all, toward what stands “before” or “beneath” signification.
2 Abraham and Torok also gave us a distinction that is indispensable for my purposes. When we lose someone or something, we can introject the loss, which means slowly working it through and making it part of our speech. Or we can incorporate it, which means swallowing it whole, burying it unspoken, and building an inner vault, a “crypt,” around it. What lives in the crypt is not a memory. It is a secret that disguises itself. The words that guard the crypt look ordinary, but they are cryptonyms: they say one thing in public and keep another thing sealed inside.
3 Derrida’s foreword to their study of the Wolf Man, “Fors,” saw what was radical here. A cryptonym is not a metaphor, because it does not stand in for something else in the open. It hides something else by standing in its place.4 In another essay, “White Mythology,” Derrida had already offered a second image I find useful: the worn coin. Concepts, he argued, are metaphors whose faces have been rubbed smooth by use, and we spend them without noticing that the figure has gone.5
I borrow from all this, but I want to say honestly where I depart. Abraham and Torok were clinicians. Their crypt belongs to a person, and later, in Abraham’s work, to families and generations. Derrida is mainly concerned with how texts and philosophical concepts produce, defer and unsettle meaning. My concern is something else. I want to describe how political, religious and administrative power empties a sign while leaving its shell standing, and how that shell is then refilled with a new content that presents itself as the sign’s natural meaning.
Deconstruction, in its commonest uses, shows how meaning is produced and kept unstable. Anasemic analysis, as I use it, follows the sign backward to what has been lost, and asks who benefited from the loss. I call it an extension rather than an application. The borrowed tools are being asked to do a job their makers did not set them.
A working definition, then. Anasemic analysis traces a sign through the loss of one signification and the arrival of another, paying equal attention to what was emptied and what filled the space. Its characteristic finding is a double motion. A word is simultaneously evacuated and occupied. That is why the process is so hard to see: the word never disappears, so no one is alarmed.
There are three ways a sign can change, and the distinctions matter later.
1. Same signifier, new signification. The word stays, the content changes. (“Hinduism” in Goa is my main case. One may also make a similar case of Christianity in Goa and show how older practices stay alongside)
2. Old signifier replaced by a new signifier. The word itself is swapped out, and with it a whole grammar of relations. (Verna and jati giving way to casta.)
3. Signifier retained as an empty institution. The word, the office or the ritual remains, but its function has been drained. (The communidade.)
Saussure taught us that the link between signifier and signified is arbitrary and can change.6 What he did not need to ask, and what Goanology must, is who changes it, by what authority, with what effect and at what cost to those who spoke the old word.
The Sea Before Vasco da Gama
Begin with the oldest and most familiar hollowing, the one that frames Goa’s entry into European history.
Schoolbooks tell us that in 1498 Vasco da Gama “discovered the sea-route to India.” Every word of that sentence deserves a second look. Sailors from the Arabian Sea had been crossing between the Gulf, the Red Sea, the Swahili coast, Gujarat, the Konkan and Malabar for centuries. Monsoon-driven trade is documented as early as the first-century Greek merchant’s guide known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, and the western Indian Ocean was among the busiest commercial zones on earth long before any Portuguese vessel left the Tagus.7 The pilots who handled those seas had written manuals, drawn on stellar navigation and accumulated a vast practical literature. The Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Majid wrote in this tradition in the fifteenth century.8 When da Gama reached the East African coast, he relied on local pilots to cross to the Malabar coast. Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s careful life of da Gama shows how much of the “discovery” was a matter of using what others already knew, and how the later legend was built out of Portuguese literary needs.9
Here the anasemic reading starts. “Discovery” is a word with a hidden condition: it presupposes that nothing, or nothing that counts, was there before. To say da Gama “discovered” the route is to declare the existing route empty of knowledge. The sea is hollowed first, and only then can it be filled with a single protagonist. The Cape of Good Hope receives the same treatment. A mid-fifteenth-century map by Fra Mauro carries a legend about an Indian-Ocean vessel sailing far out into the Atlantic. Historians still argue about it, but the argument is itself a clue to how much of the story depends on what we decide may count as evidence.10
I do not offer this as a revisionist stunt. The point is structural. The Portuguese estado da Índia, whose capital was fixed at Goa after 1510, was built on a founding sentence that deleted its predecessors. Everything that later happened to Goan words follows the same logic: first the removal of earlier significance, then the installation of a replacement that claims the same ground. Goa became Goa Dourda. Goa thus became a tabula rasa. Goa is where this logic was not merely narrated but administered. We thus have an anasemic task at hand.
From Verna and Jati to Casta
Caste is where the method shows its strength, because the story is neither a simple tale of colonial invention nor a simple tale of continuity.
Pre-Portuguese Konkan had its own vocabulary of social ordering. Varna, the fourfold classical scheme, (which in Konkani speech is verna?), was an ideal order known from texts. Jati, the thousands of birth-groups, was the lived order of marriage, occupation and ritual standing. These two terms did not mean the same thing, and the gap between them was productive. Varna offered a theory, jati a practice, and the tension between a textual ideal and a negotiated reality gave Indian social life much of its flexibility and many of its quarrels.11 (Zakon Zakon Babon Zale! )
The Portuguese brought a word of their own: casta. Derived from Latin castus, pure or unmixed, it already carried Iberian preoccupations with lineage and “purity of blood.” It was applied to Indian jati-groups from early in the sixteenth century. What happened next is the double motion I described. Casta emptied verna and jati of their separate functions by folding both into a single category of bounded, ranked, hereditary groups. It then refilled the new unitary category with a content shaped by a European sense of pedigree and by the administrative need to count and sort. Nicholas Dirks has argued, for British India, that colonial governance did much to turn caste into the master category of Indian society.12 Goa suggests that the process began earlier, under a different empire and in a different language.
Goa also complicates the story, which is why it is a good place to stand. Goan Catholic society did not abandon caste on conversion. Brahmin (Bamonn), Chardo, Sudir, Gauddo and other groups retained their distinctions, and these shaped church patronage, confraternity membership, marriage and access to office, as Robert Newman and others have shown.13So casta did not simply erase caste. It translated it into a form that could be recorded in parish registers, litigated before colonial courts and defended in a Christian idiom. After that translation, the earlier terms could not return unchanged. A Goan who says casta today speaks in a word that holds the Portuguese century inside it, while a Goan who says jati now speaks in a word whose old network of meanings is partly gone.
This is a cryptonym in the strict sense. Casta speaks in the open of “caste” as a plain fact of nature. Locked inside is the loss of an older, looser and more contested vocabulary, and the memory of how it was lost.
The Communidade and the Hollowed Gaunkari
If caste shows hollowing by replacement, the village community shows hollowing by preservation.
Before the Portuguese, the gaunkari was the village’s self-governing body, a collective of founding families, the gaunkars, who held land in common, managed water tanks and fields, funded the temple and distributed duties and shares. It was not an egalitarian paradise. Membership was hereditary and closed, and inequalities of caste and gender ran through it. But it was a living institution with its own deliberation and customs. The Portuguese, who named it communidade, did something that on the surface looks conservative. They did not abolish it. In 1526 Afonso Mexia compiled a Foral recording, the customs of the gancares, and the arrangement was later given formal shape in a Code of Communidades in the early twentieth century.14
Look at what that conservation did. Customs that had been negotiated orally and locally became written law, interpretable by officials and enforceable by courts. The village assembly acquired a registry, accounts and a supervising state. The word communidade kept the form of the old collective but altered the source of its authority, which was no longer the village’s own memory but the colonial code. The shell remained. The kernel, the village’s capacity to decide for itself, was slowly drawn out. The village republic died many deaths.
What I find most moving about this case is that the hollowing was not experienced as loss by many of those inside it. The communidade still met, still administrated land, still shared dividends. The sign was in good health. Only when we ask anasemically, “What did this word do before it was written down ? before it become commuinidade ” do we feel the draught from the empty space. A Goanology of the village would therefore not ask whether the ganvkaria “survived.” It would ask what survived of it, and in whose interest the survival was arranged.
Later chapters of the story, including the post-1961 fate of communidade lands and the new vocabularies of development, planning and property admnstration , are further layers of the same palimpsest. I leave them for the field to take up, and note only that they too involve a sign preserved while its function is changed.
“Hinduism” and the Quiet Retreat of Shiva, Vishnu, Shakti and the Naths
My fourth case is the one I find most delicate, difficult, sensitive and the one where the double motion is most visible.
The word “Hindu” began as a geographical term. Persian and Arabic writers used it for the people of the land beyond the Indus. “Hinduism,” the -ism, is a nineteenth-century coinage, a European abstraction that turned a vast ecology of cults, lineages, philosophies and local practices into one “religion” on the model of Christianity and Islam.15 Historians of religion have long argued over how far that abstraction misdescribes what it names. Whatever one concludes, it is clear that the word, in its modern sense, is not a straightforward translation of anything people in earlier centuries called themselves.
Now look at Goa. The Portuguese commonly called non-Christians gentios, “gentiles,” and the category was legal and administrative before it was theological. It was a negative identity: what you were by not being Christian.16 A Konkan villager whose family served Saptakoteshwar, a Shaiva shrine associated with the Kadamba rulers, whose neighbours worshipped Mahalsa, who recalled a Nath ancestor or who bowed at a Shakta shrine such as Shantadurga, was increasingly addressed under one flat label with colonisation.17 The distinctions among Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Shaktism, the Nath traditions etc., which mattered enormously to the practitioners and their temples, were hollowed out and not recognised in the law that governed them.
The label then did its second work. When Portuguese religious policy displaced temples, destroyed or prohibited some forms of worship and pushed shrines into the Ponda and other hinterland territories, it was dealing not with “Hinduism” but with particular deities, priests and communities.18 Yet the response, and later the self-description, increasingly gathered under the shared name. A solidarity formed against a pressure that had only one word for everyone. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Goa’s own politics took shape alongside Indian nationalism, the word “Hindu” gained further, newer content from outside, from the Indian political field.
I want to say carefully what I am and am not claiming. I am not saying that Goan “Hindus” have no real religion, or that older traditions are gone. Temples, festivals, lineage deities and ritual specialists are very much alive. My claim is narrower. The name by which these traditions are now collectively known carries a meaning different from the meaning of the names by which they once knew themselves, and the gap between the two has a history shaped by empire, law and politics. “Hinduism” in Goa is a sign that was emptied of its internal differences and refilled with a unity that serves particular purposes of administration and politics. A sign that works this way is easy to mobilise because it asks nothing of its users except allegiance. Its cost is that the specific idioms of Shiva, Vishnu, Shakti and the Naths, each with their own stories, are quietly demoted to the status of “sects” or “forms” inside a larger whole that did not previously exist as a whole.
A Goanology that takes anasemy seriously has a delicate task here. It must neither defend the old fragmentation as a lost Eden nor celebrate the new unity as a natural fact. It must keep both in view, and ask what each arrangement lets people say and what it silences.
Vote Deletion and the New Eklavyas
So far my examples are old. Let me close with one that is happening now, because a method that can only read the past is of little use.
In the Mahabharata, Eklavya, a young Nishada boy, teaches himself archery before a clay image of the teacher Drona, who has refused him as a pupil. When Drona discovers that Eklavya has become as skilled as his favourite, Arjuna, he demands, as his fee, the boy’s right thumb.19 Eklavya gives it. The story has been read in many ways, but one reading stays with me: a person is not forbidden to have the skill, but is stripped of the one part of the body that makes the skill usable. The capacity remains in name and is made impossible in practice.
Consider the modern vote in this light. In a constitutional democracy, the word “voter” signifies a bundle of things: membership, standing, the right to be counted among equals. It also signifies something quite physical, the inked finger. When names are removed from electoral rolls through large-scale revision exercises, the people so removed do not cease to be citizens in law. They continue to live, work, pay and belong. What changes is the signification of the word “voter.” It is quietly redefined. The signifier stays the same, and the document becomes its condition. The ones who lose most are those least able to produce the document: migrants, the poor, the elderly, women who have moved after marriage, and those whose records have always been fragile due to floods and fragile lives.20
On this reading, deletion is a contemporary Eklavya-event. The thumb is not cut. The name is struck out, and the effect is similar. I need to be precise about the limits of my claim, because it is easy to overstate. Whether particular deletions in particular places were errors, necessary clean-ups or something worse is a matter of evidence, and it is being argued in public, in courts. In the streets and in the press. Reasonable people differ about the scale and the intent. The anasemic claim is more modest and, I think, more durable. It is that wherever a right is tied to a sign, and the conditions for holding the sign are redefined, there is a hollowing, and the hollowing deserves to be traced as carefully as the earlier ones. Goa, with its long experience of the documentary state, from Portuguese parish registers to the present, is an obvious place to draw inspiration for this form of tracing.
Method, Cautions and Honest Objections
A new field should expect objections and invite them early. I list four that I take seriously.
First, the danger of nostalgia. To say a meaning has been hollowed out is to imply that it was once full. That implication can slip into romance about a golden pre-colonial Goa. The older meanings were themselves products of power: the gaunkari excluded, verna ranked, temples had their own hierarchies. Anasemy does not ask us to restore. It asks us to see.
Second, the danger of treating all change as loss. Meanings change for many reasons: migration, trade, literacy, the choices of people who find new words more useful. Not every shift is a hollowing. The test I propose is an asymmetry of power: a change counts as hollowing when those who spoke the old meaning were not the ones who authorised its replacement.
Third, evidence. A method concerned with what has been lost works with absence, and absence is hard to document. Goanology must therefore be disciplined about sources: temple records, forais, inquisition papers, parish registers, oral genealogies, songs, place-names and the shape of fields, and thus read against the grain.21 When the evidence is thin, the honest result is a question, not a conclusion.
Fourth, the relation to Foucault. Readers will see that some of what I describe resembles Michel Foucault’s accounts of how discursive formations replace one another.22 The resemblance is real. The difference, as I understand it, is one of focus. Foucault maps the rules that make statements possible. Anasemic analysis dwells on the survival of the signifier after the rules have changed, on the crypt rather than the archive, and on what the continuing word keeps secret.
A Field, Beginning
What would a Goanology look like if it grew? I imagine at least three kinds of work.
There would be word-histories in the old sense, but written with the hollowing in mind: gaunkar, bhatkar, mundkar, casta, gentio, Hindu, Catholic, Goan itself. Each would be asked what it held, what it lost, what now fills it and who did the filling and what is its effect today?
There would be institutional studies of shells that continue: the communidade, the confraternity, the temple mahajan, the village school, the electoral roll. These are all places where the form survives, and the question is what has been drawn out. Where is the matter in the form?
And there would be comparative work, since Goa is not unique, only unusually legible. A coastal village in Kerala, a river town in Bengal, a mining belt in Jharkhand could each be asked the same question. A field called Goanology need not stay in Goa. It begins there because the layers are so close to the surface. Politics is anasemic . Minorities are drained or hollowed of their Indian-ness. Christians, Muslims and others are made to feel not Indian enough.
I will end with the human side of it, since the subject deserves that. Behind every hollowed word are people who used it with their whole lives: who named a deity, a field, a relative, a quarrel. When we say a signification was “lost,” we mean that somewhere a grandmother’s word no longer reaches her grandchildren with its full weight and power. The task of Goanology is not to scold the present or to resurrect the past. It is to make the loss audible, so that the shell, when it rattles, becomes political and oppressive is understood for what it is. Only then can we decide, openly and together, what we want to put back, and what we are content to let go. We have to ethically choose this.
Endnotes
1. The term “Goanology” is proposed here as a working name for a field, not as an established discipline. On the larger Indian Ocean setting in which such a field would sit, see K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and M. N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003).
2. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Abraham’s essays on anasemia should be consulted there directly; this paper uses the term in an extended and not strictly Abrahamian sense, as stated in the text.
3. On introjection, incorporation and the crypt, see Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation,” in The Shell and the Kernel; and their The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
4. Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” trans. Barbara Johnson, foreword to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word.
5. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). The “worn coin” image (usure) is developed there, and engages Nietzsche’s remark on truths as effaced coins.
6. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), on the arbitrariness of the sign and on change in language over time.
7. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, trans. and ed. Lionel Casson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Chaudhuri and Pearson (note 1) give the wider picture of medieval monsoon trade.
8. G. R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1971), which translates Ibn Majid’s navigational writings. The old claim that Ibn Majid personally guided da Gama has been disputed, and I do not rely on it.
9. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
10. The Fra Mauro legend is discussed in the general literature on pre-Portuguese navigation; treat it as contested evidence rather than settled fact. See Tibbetts (note 8) and Subrahmanyam (note 9) for further reading and for cautions.
11. On the relation between varna and jati in Indian historiography, see Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
12. Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Bayly (note 11) offers a more qualified view of colonial “invention.” On the Portuguese use of casta, further primary-source work is needed, and the claim in the text should be tested against the sixteenth-century texts before being relied upon.
13. Robert S. Newman, Of Umbrellas, Goddesses and Dreams: Essays on Goan Culture and Society (Mapusa: Other India Press, 2001).
14. On the Foral de usos e costumes of 1526 and the later legal codification of the comunidades, see V. T. Gune (ed.), Gazetteer of the Union Territory Goa, Daman and Diu: District Gazetteer, Part I – Goa (Panaji: Gazetteer Department, 1979).
