Derrida says both hostility and hospitality have common origin. Goans being hospitable by their very nature are challenged to keep away from all kinds of hostility injected into our society. The so called return to a golden Hinduism that the right wing groups wish to enact in Goa and our country is nothing short of hostility.
Such a hostile mode of being is neither Goan nor genuinely Hindu.
We are shocked and angered to find how our great author and free thinker Damodar Mauzo is on the killing list of some affiliates of a notorious right wing group working in Goa. It is heartening to see that Goans of all hues and colours stood up for our eminent writer.
The death threat to Mauzo poses challenge to all Goans and questions the possibilities of being a Goan at a time of Hindutva.
Our past under colonization has been tumultuous but the Goan spirit is strong enough to heal itself without calling the innocents of today to pay for the sins of past colonial masters.
All Goans suffered differently under colonization. This is why the right wing narrative that constructs our Hindu brethren as the only victims actually doubly wounds a section of Goans who are Christians of today.
There is no solution in wounding the present or the approaching future as some videos by Shefali Vaidya tried to propose in recent days via social media.
Recognition of the wounded past is the beginning of the process of healing. Here, we may do well to learn from great German thinker Hegel who did not see what may be regarded as the fall of the decent into evil.
He teaches that it is the fall and a sense of loss thereof that produces an imagined ideal state from which we claim to have fallen. In the light of Hegel, we might be enabled to view our wounds of the past and sense of loss that haunts our present anew.
This does not mean that pre-Portuguese Goa was a tabula rasa. It also was not a pure paradise as imagined by some adherents of the right wing. Like our days, it was also a mixed bag with its strengths and weaknesses.
At the most we might trace oppression of the upper caste in that period among other things good and bad.
The recognition of our wounds of the past and how they colour the past and future and haunt our present can be therapeutic to our society.
It can bring real healing to all communities in Goa.
Unconditional acceptance of our wounds and how they produce an imagined past and future is the way of being authentically Goan at a time of Hindutva.
There is both liberating and enslaving potential in the wounds of the past.
The right wing hindutva groups seem to be investing into to the enslaving potentials. They recognize the wounds of the past but seek healing by wounding the present.
Being Goan at a time of Hindutva is an intense call to be ethical. We can trace in this ethical imperative a challenge to embrace every victim of the colonial past.
It is in this embrace that we can find therapy for the broken past and build a harmonious present and future that is congruent with the Goan spirit.
The Goan spirit can feel the gaps that are introduced by the wounds of the past. It can gracefully view the construction of an ideal past and dynamism of its re-enactment in our days by the right wing as nothing but an water on darks back.
Hence, the wound that we never choose but was inflicted on us by our collective past is a redeeming wound. It can heal our society. It has the power to make us compassionate and enable us to understand that we are differently wounded by our past.
This sensitization to the wounded fellow Goan can enable us to seek healing in a loving embrace of each other. It is an invitation to forgive our past and accept Goan-ness that we find expressed in the flesh and blood of every Goan.
Being Goan at a time of Hindutva is a challenge to find healing in the wound itself and not in some ideal past that can never be built into a projected future.
The ideal past is impotent. It cannot be rendered actual. All that we have is present that is afflicted by the wounds of the past.
Real Goan spirit has the power to heal every Goan who is victimized by the turmoil of the colonial past as well as neo-colonial present inaugurated by politics of Hindutva.
Hence, Standing in solidarity to defend creative free thinking of Damodar Mouzo is a good beginning. We cannot allow our own to be destroyed by those who have genocidal instincts. Our solidarity opens for us possibilities of accepting several freedoms chosen by each of us.
The spirit of Goa is in this openness to different ways of being Goans. It is only in the defence of these many freedoms that we can find the spirit of Goa.
