PANAJI
The Al-Zulaij Collective has announced that its member Dr Jason Keith Fernandes has been awarded the Selva J Raj Book Award (2017-2022) for his book ‘Citizenship in a Caste Polity: Religion, Language and Belonging in Goa’.
The Society for Hindu-Christian Studies is a Related Scholarly Organisation of the American Academy of Religion and publishes the ‘Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies’, an annual scholarly journal dedicated to the study of Hinduism and Christianity and their interrelationships.
The Selva J Raj Book Award is awarded every two years, for the “Best Book in Hindu-Christian Studies.” The award, which includes an honorarium, will be presented at a special session of the American Academy of Religion in November 2022 in Denver, USA. This session will also feature a panel discussion of the book by eminent scholars, with Dr Fernandes who will be invited as a respondent.
Recognising the book as “theoretically astute, rigorously researched, and lucidly argued,” the Award Committee recognises that ‘Citizenship in a Caste Polity’, which was published by Orient Blackswan in 2020, “makes a pathbreaking contribution to Hindu-Christian studies by providing an analysis of Goa, a region… whose stories unsettle notions of a monolithic colonial and postcolonial Indian experience… [and] takes readers into the understudied plight of linguistically and culturally marginalised classes of Goans, and in so doing, casts light upon broader issues of citizenship, humiliation, and belonging among many classes of Indians.”
‘Citizenship in a Caste Polity’ studies the struggle of Konkani language activists to obtain official language status for Konkani’s much used Roman script.
In discussing the demands for, and resistance against, the Roman script’s official recognition, Dr Fernandes offers a well-researched history of the language, Goan politics, and demonstrates the experience of Catholics in Goa, especially those from labouring caste and class backgrounds, as that of second-class citizens.
The Al-Zulaij Collective is an association of scholars and professionals, who believe that Goa’s complex history and cultural encounters do not easily fit into the mainstream imagination of the territory.
Goa has been a part of many ‘worlds’, but the Al-Zulaij Collective finds that many of those culturally enriching encounters are now being deliberately forgotten. Determined to rectify this misrepresentation, the Collective brings together diverse voices on Goa, and varied capacities to articulate issues about Goa, and to look at the world through Goan culture and history.
