The big change in Goa

The last time I was in Goa, the land of my ancestors, was in 2019. It was my 90th birthday and I decided to celebrate it with my brother and my cousins who live in Goa. Till I joined the Indian Police Service in 1953, my travel destination was only one — Goa. As soon as the school mid-term vacation was announced in October, and the end-of-term vacation in April, we boarded the ‘Mahalaxmi’ or ‘Saint Anthony’, one of the two steamer ships that sailed along the Konkan coast between Bombay and Panjim.

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A common grouse I hear from even my own relatives is that Goans have been reduced to a minority in their own land!

The vacations were spent at the home of my maternal grandparents at a small village called Badem in Salvador do Mundo. My mother and her four sisters would congregate there with their children. We did not require any gimmicks to keep us amused. We just enjoyed each other’s company.

Our grandmother would hire half a dozen ‘matchboxes’, bullock carts with a contraption built over the cart. We all piled into them, our luggage and attendants in another set of ‘matchboxes’, as we called them, and set out on the slow journey to the beach. A cottage had been booked for a week, a sort of holiday from the routine of the main holiday.

As the holidays neared their end, we planned for our return to Mumbai. The return journey was usually by train since the monsoon would set in and the steamer services discontinued for the duration of the rains.

The last time I stayed in my maternal home was when I was preparing for the Civil Services examination. I landed up at my grandmother’s home in June and stayed on till September, when the written exams were held. It rained without respite right through my stay.

It was a huge house. My grand-mother had only an elderly woman to cook for her and a small girl for odd jobs. There was a constant demand on me to cease studying for some time every day to sit down and talk to her. There was no electricity in the villages. At night, I studied under a petromax. I had to speak to my grandmother in Portuguese, a language spoken at home and with relatives, but not learnt in school by a Mumbai-based Goan like me!

When I arrived in the village, it was well past sunset. I called out to my grandmother, who asked the girl attendant to check the identity of the nocturnal visitor. She did not need to do that as the door was open. I strode into the house and surprised her. I mention this because things have changed drastically since those days of my youth. No house is left open now. In fact, the modern phenomenon is of gated communities with security personnel drawn mainly from the North of the country, where unemployment is a major problem.

In my youth, I had not seen a uniformed policeman during my stay in Goa. There was one ‘Mestiso’ family in my mother’s village. The Mestisos, also known as ‘paclos’ in Konkani were those with Portuguese blood mixed with Goan. One of the Mestiso boys was employed as a ‘soldado’, a soldier. The few policemen in uniform were also called ‘soldados’. The Badem ‘soldado’ was probably a policeman, but I never saw him in uniform. Goa’s police has more cops for every thousand of the population, certainly much more than Maharashtra, yet the only policemen I have seen on Goa’s streets today are the traffic cops in white shirts and the whistle which stamps their authority.

The only Goans I see on roads today are taxi drivers, who keep a sharp look out for the ubiquitous tourist. When I visited this year, the church — on X’mas Day and New Year’s Day — was filled with Goan Christians.

The influx of Punjabis and other North Indians in Goa is very noticeable. In the gated community in which I stayed as a guest of my granddaughter and her husband, the residents I met were from all over the country, but the owners of the bungalows were Punjabis. The domestic help was drawn from Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and Assam. Electricians and plumbers, as well as other tradesmen required to maintain modern households, hail mainly from neighbouring Karnataka. Since quite a major chunk of them are Muslims, the percentage of Muslims in Goa has risen from 2% in 1961 to 8% today. Goans had not seen women in burqas in colonial days. Property owners are based in Delhi or Punjab. Property prices have risen so drastically since my student days that well-to-do locals have been effectively eclipsed from the market.

A common grouse I heard from even my own relatives was that Goans had been reduced to a minority in their own land! I pointed out that Goans were themselves the culprits. Many Christians, in particular, had migrated to the UK, Canada and Australia after selling off their patrimony. The Punjabis paid big bucks, striking deals that were difficult to refuse!

In contrast, the eclipse of the Tripuris in Tripura was triggered by an influx of Bengali Hindus from Bangladesh soon after Partition. The eclipse of the Bhutias and Lepchas in Sikkim was the result of large-scale Nepali migration into Darjeeling district of Bengal and further into Sikkim to its north. The influx of alien people into settled areas invariably causes social tensions which persist for decades. In the small states populated by tribals, like Meghalaya, the conflict between the locals and the people from the plains need much greater attention lest it leads to violent confrontations.

But reverting to my holiday in the land of my ancestors, I was happy to meet up with my only surviving sibling, who turned 92 during my11-day holiday. Six of our group of cousins had crossed 90, three have surpassed my age of 93 plus. Of the six nonagenarians, four were not able to hear and one other could manage to hear with one ear. One was totally blind and the mobility of each of them, except that of my brother, was impaired.

Well, these are the wages of old age. My late wife would rail against the ravages of old age till I pointed out to her that the alternative was to go early to eternal rest!