Plato understood mimesis as the engine of human culture. In the Republic, he described it as imitation: we learn by copying gestures, stories, and forms. Yet he warned that mimesis is treacherous. It produces copies of copies, shadows twice removed from truth, seducing us away from reality into illusion. Two millennia later, the anthropologist and literary theorist René Girard radicalised this insight. Desire, Girard argued, is never spontaneous. We do not want things because they are inherently desirable; we want them because others want them. This borrowed wanting, mimetic desire quickly turns rivalrous. When two or more hands reach for the same object, whether a piece of land, a language, or a symbol of belonging, imitation breeds conflict. The conflict escalates until it finds relief in the oldest social technology: the scapegoat. One party is singled out, blamed, and expelled or vilified so the rest can feel unified again. Girard called the entire spiral mimetic violence.
Goa lives this dialectic in its bones. Post-colonial, post-liberation, post-statehood, the territory has never been allowed to simply be. Its identity has been forged through imitation and opposition, through binaries that mimic external models of purity and then turn those models against one another. The result is a society chained to itself, where every fresh controversy reveals the same ancient mechanism at work.
Look at the historical record, still raw in living memory. In the 1960s, Goa faced the stark referendum on merger with Maharashtra. The question was framed as existential: remain distinct or dissolve into a larger Marathi whole. Campaigners on both sides did not invent fresh arguments; they imitated nationalist scripts borrowed from Bombay and Delhi. One side mimicked the rhetoric of linguistic self-determination; the other copied the language of administrative efficiency and cultural unity. The desire for legitimacy became rivalrous. When the ballot rejected merger, the resentment did not vanish; it simply mutated into the next binary. The language question followed. Konkani or Marathi as official tongue? Again, an either-or structure. To defend Konkani was to imitate the model of a pristine indigenous voice; to champion Marathi was to imitate the claim of historical continuity. The other language was not merely different; it became an intruder with “no justified place to exist.” The mimetic engine turned difference into threat, dialogue into accusation.
Today the same pattern repeats in the uncalled-for derogatory remarks aimed at Goycho Saib. The figure deeply woven into Goan Catholic and folk memory, a symbol of lived syncretism and coastal resilience is now juxtaposed against Parasurama, the axe-wielding avatar credited in Hindu legend with carving Goa from the sea. The juxtaposition is not neutral. It is staged as rivalry. Social media, political speeches, and casual conversation frame the two as competitors for the title of “true founder.” One must prevail; the other must be diminished. Derogatory jibes at Goycho Saib are not isolated insults. They are mimetic violence in its right. The speaker imitates a desire already circulating in certain echo chambers, the desire for an uncontaminated Hindu origin story that erases colonial and Christian layers. By mocking Goycho Saib, the speaker signals loyalty to that borrowed desire and casts the rival symbol as the obstacle. The mechanism is textbook Girard: convergence of desire produces rivalry; rivalry produces a victim; the victim is blamed so the group can feel righteous.
This is the mimetic dialectics chaining Goa. Every identity issue is forced into a binary because binary thinking is the easiest imitation. It requires no original thought, only loyalty to the side one has copied. The result is a society that spends its energy policing boundaries instead of cultivating what lies within them. Environmental degradation, youth out-migration, the pressures of mass tourism, the slow erosion of village commons, these urgent questions receive half-attention because public passion is consumed by the latest either-or battle. The dialectics do not merely divide; they paralyse. Goa becomes a hall of mirrors in which every reflection is someone else’s desire, never our own.
The way out cannot be another imitation. We cannot “solve” mimesis by copying yet another external ideology secularism, majoritarianism, or romantic localism. Girard himself pointed toward a harder path: awareness followed by renunciation. The first step is collective recognition. Schools, colleges, panchayats, and public forums must begin to name the mechanism aloud. Let students read simplified Girard alongside local history. Let every political rally and newspaper column be asked: “Whose desire are we repeating? Who is being turned into the scapegoat this week?” Naming the game robs it of its invisibility. Once the mimetic spiral is visible, it loses its sacred aura.
The second step is the deliberate cultivation of non-mimetic desire. Goa already possesses the raw material. Its cuisine, its architecture, its festivals, its very landscape are products of layered borrowing that refused to become rivalry. Portuguese tiles sit beside laterite walls; Konkani lyrics carry Portuguese refrains; Hindu and Christian calendars overlap in shared feasts. This hybridity is not impurity; it is proof that desire need not become violent. We must stop apologising for it and start celebrating it as the authentic Goan genius. Cultural institutions should commission new workslike plays, songs, murals in which Goycho Saib and Parasurama appear not as rivals but as co-creators of the same coastline. When symbols are allowed to enrich rather than cancel one another, mimetic desire withers.
The Leaders have to refuse the binary trap. Language policy can move beyond Konkani-Marathi to a confident trilingualism that treats every tongue spoken on Goan soil as an asset or resource. Development debates must be framed around shared outcomes such as clean rivers, liveable villages, dignified livelihoods rather than around who “owns” the narrative of Goan-ness. Civil society groups can create safe spaces for genuine encounter: inter-faith reading circles, cross-community environmental projects, youth exchanges between talukas that have been pitted against each other for decades. Each such encounter weakens the scapegoat reflex.
Finally, Goa must rediscover the courage of interiority. Mimetic desire thrives on external gaze, what will Delhi think, what will social media applaud? A post-mimetic society turns inward and asks: what do we, as Goans living here and now, actually need and value? The answer will not be uniform, and that is the point. Uniformity is the dream of the mimetic crowd. Plurality is the reality of the land itself, its red laterite and white sand, its churches and temples built on the same hillocks, its people carrying multiple histories in one body.
Plato feared that mimesis would keep us in the cave. Girard showed how it leads to the lynching outside the cave. Goa has wandered long enough between these shadows. The derogatory remarks against Goycho Saib are not a minor cultural spat; they are the latest symptom of a society still chained. But chains are only unbreakable while we refuse to see them. Awareness, creativity, encounter, and interior courage, these are not utopian slogans. They are practical, local, and already latent in Goan soil. The mimetic dialectics have had their day. The time has come to step out of the imitation game and begin desiring, at last, for ourselves.
