Goa's Liberation and Thereafter: review

[dale luis menezes]

Dears,

Check my review of Suresh Kanekar's GOA'S LIBERATION AND THEREAFTER @ http://daleluismenezes.blogspot.in/2013/05/freedom-fighters-academics-and-goas.html

Dale

Find my writings @ www.daleluismenezes.blogspot.com
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[Paulo Varela Gomes]

Dear Dale,

A reliable history of the freedom fight in Goa during the 20th century has yet to be told. But it won't be. That would be as difficult as writing a reliable history of the French resistance to German occupation in WW II, or a reliable history of Portuguese resistance to Salazar's regime...

Paulo Varela Gomes

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[J. Colaco < jc>]

Paulo Varela Gomes <paulovar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Dale,
A reliable history of the freedom fight in Goa during the 20th century
has yet to be told. But it won't be. That would be as difficult as
writing a reliable history of the French resistance to German
occupation in WW II, or a reliable history of Portuguese resistance to
Salazar's regime...

COMMENT:

Ditto.

What may be told in its place is: His Story, Her Story and a Story
that fits a convenient Narrative.

jc

[Paulo Varela Gomes]

Dear Dale,

Unfortunately, lack of documentation is not what I hint at. I believe there are many, many documents. What the three cases (and many others) have in common is the simple fact that the vast majority of the respective populations (Goan, French, Portuguese) offered no resistance to the regimes in question, lived quietly and peacefully through them and only occasionally, very occasionally, did the freedom fighter ultra-minority obtain active support for the population at large. More: a considerable amount of people, in Goa, in France, in Portugal, actively cooperated with the ruling powers of the time. This has been more that proved for the French case, and this alone prevents a reliable history of French resistance being told: nobody wants it.

There is another angle, an even more problematic one: the history of the freedom fighters who cooperated with the police. We don't like to be reminded of the sad history of those who were broken by torture and even of those who went all the way and started working for the police in result of having broken under torture. 

We want even less to remember the others: those who worked with the police out of simple fear. 

And finally there were the traitors, the double agents.

The real world is a murky world.

But it is not an even world: repression in France was unbelievably brutal. In Portugal, some resistant were treated with great harshness (communists), others with utter brutality (resistant in Portuguese Africa), many more leniently (bourgeois opposition in Portugal, except when they recurred to arms: my mother, an upper class lady, was brutally tortured, for instance, because she was an accomplice of my father in an armed attempt at overthrowing Salazar). 

In Goa, as far as I know, there was no real brutality except occasionally. This probably explains why so few of the freedom fighters I have read about were treated with real harshness and so many were almost friendly with the police or the authorities. Of course, Salazar wanted no trouble in Goa, to keep Nehru hesitating. But there were other reasons too: Goan nattionalists were by and large not communists. Between the colonial authorities and the armed resistence there were one million shades of grey.

Yes hagiography is a problem. Because we need saints and we like to forget about our demons or about our reality as common people. 

Best

Pvg 

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 8:49 AM, dale luis menezes <dale_m...@rediffmail.com> wrote:

Dear Dr. Varela Gomes,

I do agree with you that there won't be a 'reliable history' of the freedom struggle. If I have understood you correctly, what you are hinting at is the dearth of data in the form of autobiographies, documentation etc for the writing of these reliable histories. Right now there does not seem to be any way out of it since what is written is largely viewed through the nationalist lens. However, since Suresh Kanekar's autobiography does not try to fit its narrative in the established hagiographies of the freedom movement, I believe that it is possible for us to devise alternate reading strategies using Kanekar's text. Perhaps, we could also look at some memoirs or autobiographies of Portuguese soldiers (if there are any) in developing this alternate readings of the history of Goa's freedom struggle.

Regards,

Dale Luis Menezes

[Bernicepereira]

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