Romancing Goa

Moving to Goa

Author: Katharina Kakar

Publisher: Penguin , Rs 499

This book narrates tribulations and triumphs of new beginnings in a near-perfect paradise that is Goa, says Savia Viegas

Katharina Kakar’s account of moving to a rural, ‘stress-free idyll’ has her looking at a decade-long tryst of living the ‘idyll’ and the ‘real’ of a life in Goa. Her story, as the jacket blurb says, “is all about sun and sand, beaches and bikinis, feni and vindaloo.” It promises to deliver all of this and more. “It is every insider’s dream to project a real Goa, outside of the myriads of images — some shocking, some sublime that invade our consciousness time and again. My account of Goa where I have settled for 10 years is very personal,” Kakar writes.  Dipping into the concurrent debate regarding settlers in Goa, she says that hers is the gaze of the outsider — the bhaile — which at times becomes that of an insider.  However, I appreciate the way Kakar has made a commendable attempt to get a grasp of local language and culture.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

While the book starts like a white woman’s narrative of an exotic eastern land gasping at the heat,                                                              with her surroundings and complaining of thefts, it soon matures into something else. Kakar’s life in Benaulim is lived without illusions of it being a rural idyll yet in harmony and in appreciation of the good things in life.

Goa’s active local press constantly reports on wild life, mining, and rampant construction activities, all of which and more is reflected in Kakar’s book carefully footnoted. In a shangri-la of cannabis and music created by the Hippies in the early seventies, the whole scene is presently vitiated into an unholy nexus between politicians, police and drug lords, plied inch by inch with money power.

Kakar asks why Goans react violently to perceptions of permissiveness quoting the now famously infamous Tarun Tejpal quote — ‘When in Goa …’ and the local reaction to it. Having been born, raised and now having returned to roots, I feel these scribbles tend to write and define what is and what is not, more since the onslaught of tourism has clearly fractured the State into two different and uncompromising identities. 

Also, it is clear that drawn by the picture of verdant charm and beauty, young men from Jharkhand, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and the Northeast make a scramble for the land of the sun and sand — to waiting the tables, transforming into beach-boys, befriending western women, both young and aging, in the hope that they can strike a ‘lucky ticket’ to the West or at least simply have some good time. So much so that according to Kakar, the unwritten rule book of the beach boys says: “Indian girls are for marriage, western girls are for fun.”

Kakar offers some interesting insights of perceptions of Goa as a tourist haven in the eyes of young Indians who spend time here consuming the space that is set apart from the rest of India: “Prominent among the tourists taking part in Christmas festivities on the beach are the middle and upper-class youngsters from Delhi, Bombay and other Indian cities. For them Goa is a ‘mythical paradise’ of unlimited wine, women and song, and nowhere else in India do these young people feel so liberated from social inhibitions, middle-class mores and the disapproving gaze of their elders.”

Research and better editing could have prevented several oversights. For instance, there are old Goan homes (not Portuguese); feni is distilled from the cashew apple not the cashew nut; the damonem is not an earthen container but the dried and cured outer skin of a gourd; and dyke is a bandh/bund, not khazani. 

In 2007 when I was publishing my first book Tales from the Attic using Konkani, Portuguese, Marathi and Hindi words without italicising, the stance puckered many a brow. “Readers will not understand,” said many a doyen, frowning. Clearly as I saw it as an Asian who had been through the vicissitudes of colonialism, this was the language palette that one used on an everyday basis and I did not see the reason for italicising it. “I didn’t learn the word ‘weltenchaung’ italicised,” I shot back in response. “It is the only way one can reinstate disenfranchised languages.” Today, it is heartening to see the writer using local language phrases woven into the text. My kudos to her and may the ilk grow.