I stole the title of this blog from Graham Greene’s 1964 story, Goa the Unique, published in the Sunday Times in March that year.
Greene would have been 59 or 60 years old when he wrote “Goa the Unique,” a piece for the Sunday Times, shortly after his travels in India led him to explore some part of Incredible! Goa. This was Goa before it became a state, when the verdict about Goa’s destiny was unknown. Many assumed, as Greene hints, that Goa would soon join its poorer – and by Greene’s suggestion, inferior – neighbour, Maharashtra.
“In the first Indian village outside Goa on the road to Bombay you are back to the mud huts and broken thatch which are almost a sign of affluence compared with the horrible little cabins made out of palm fronds and bits of canvas and any piece of old metal on the outskirts of Bombay,” he wrote. “These are dwellings to escape from; how can their inhabitants feel loyalty to Maharashtra – the huge amorphous member-State of the Indian Union neighbouring Goa, into which Goa must almost certainly be sooner or later submerged.”
In the end Goankars opted for statehood over a merger with Maharashtra with 54 percent voting for an independent state.
I recently discovered that Greene was an MI6 agent during the second world war, sucked into the intelligence vortex thanks to his reputation for voracious travel coupled with his keen insight into local cultures, politics and evolutions. In his piece on Goa, too, his writing boasts an insight not often seen in journalists writings even today when there is so much more access to information, people and movements. If the Sunday Times was printing features of this length and depth in 1964, reading Goa the Unique is a also lesson in the state of decline in global journalism.
But I digress. Greene’s essay, which recently found its way into Jerry Pinto’s eclectic collection of stories on Goa, Reflected in Water (Penguin Books India 2006) tells us that Christian Goa is split into two parts – the wealthier southern Jesuits and the poorer northern Franciscans. I haven’t asked anyone about this divergence but I hadn’t picked up on it at all in my first month here. Greene is fascinated by Goa’s syncretic lifestyle. Describing nazar utharna rituals and local belief in supernatural phenomena, he takes us into the uniquely Christian, Hindu amalgamation of faith and practice in Goa.
Greene writes about the rest of India much like Naipaul — alright, that’s not fair. Nobody writes about India like our Trinidadian friend but India is seen as gloomy, poor, backward – which, I suppose it was in 1964. That view of India is much like writings on India during that period, which have been written about extensively in Ramchandra Guha’s book, India After Gandhi.
That’s not to say Greene is wrong. Certainly, even today, Goa seems pretty unique, despite sharing its rich, coastal Konkan culture with both Maharashtra and Karnataka. In addition to Greene’s admiration for the scenic and cultural beauty of this area, he may also have felt a religious tie to the land. In fact, Goa’s Catholic culture does attract a wide range of religious tourists, besides many others who may be non-practicing but feel an unspoken, cultural tie in a land dotted with splendid, white-washed churches. Greene, too, was a converted Catholic. He was baptized in February 1926 at the age of 22 just before he married Vivien Dayrell-Browning, herself a convert who brought him into the fold. It is said that Greene never remarried and never divorced Vivien Browning even after they separated in 1948 because of his strong, Catholic views. That, of course, didn’t stop him from having many, many relationships.
But in any case, this bond may have, in part, influenced his romance with Goa.
The world evoked in Greene’s essay may be under some communal pressure today, thanks in part to rising fundamentalism worldwide. But Goa’s syncretic traditions remain, a fascinating reality despite 451 years of colonialism. The sense of mutli-religiosity and multi-culturalism that Greene captured clearly exists today, almost a half century later, much of it woven into the fabric of language. Portuguese is, more or less, dead but viva la Konkani.
Goa the unique 