Fact Sheet - "GOA"
© Prakash John Mascarenhas
Portugal was one of the countries occupied by the Muslim Arabs bent on world conquest soon after the inauguration of Islam. Over the centuries, Portugal and its neighbour, Spain, managed to gradually overthrow Islam and regain independence. Remembering the brutality and humiliations heaped on them during the Muslim occupation, the Portuguese did not rest there but charged on, seeking revenge against the Muslims - the "Moors". That primeval urge drove the Portuguese to circumnavigate Africa and reach India.
India at the time was under Muslim - Arab, Turk, etc., domination, with the Arabs, particularly, controlling the Indian seas. The Portuguese set out to destroy this Arab monopoly of the seas with particular gusto.
South India at the time had a large Hindu empire, Vijayanagar, which was locked in near perpetual combat with the ever-encroaching 'Bahamani' Muslims, led by sultans of Brahmin extraction, from the north. One of these Muslim principalities, Bijapur had occupied Goa (an ancient port city dominated by Hindus but nevertheless having a smattering of ancient Christian communities) and its neighbourhoods time and again, and despite repeated attempts at the request of its peoples, Vijayanagar was unable to lastingly liberate it.
Shortly, to its dismay and that of Goa's peoples, they learnt that the Sultan of Bijapur planned to shift his capital to Goa. In desperation, Vijayanagar turned to the Portuguese, given their superior naval power, to liberate Goa.
In 1510, the Portuguese sailed in and conquered Goa. Within a few months Bijapur re-conquered the port city. However, the Portuguese were not to be disheartened and returned on 5th November, the feast of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, after a thorough preparation. This time they were there to stay.
Shortly after, the Vijayanagar Empire itself fell to the combined Muslim principalities.
The Portuguese enclave of Goa was never secure, being surrounded by the territories of the more powerful Sultan of Bijapur on all sides. The Portuguese set out to correct this by gradually liberating the districts around the city. Thus the district of Ilhas - Tisvaddim, which houses the city of Goa, and the districts of Bardez and the southern Shasti, constituting the Old Conquests - the Velhas Conquistas, and the districts of Pernem, Bicholim, Satarim, Antruz (Ponda), Sanguem, Quepem and Canacona constituting the New Conquests - the Novas Conquistas, were liberated.
The land ruled over by the Portuguese came to be called Goa after the ancient port-city of Goa which was the first Portuguese conquest in India, in much the same way that the English, spreading out from the port cities of Bombay and Madras, incorporated all the territories they conquered to the provinces named after these cities - the Bombay and Madras Presidencies.
During the Great Plague, the ancient city of Goa was ravaged and the Portuguese therefore abandoned it as being unhealthy due to its proximity to the riverine swamps.
The Portuguese then relocated their headquarters to the village of Pangim (Konkani Ponje, pronounced as "Ponjjae") which they renamed "Nova Goa" with the former and now abandoned capital being nicknamed Velha Goa - Old Goa.
The land, however, was actually always called the Konkan. The Konkan is a large stretch which extends from the Gangaveli River in the south, near Honavar, to the Narmada in the north, with the Sahyadri Mountains (Western Ghats) and the Arabian Sea as its eastern and western boundaries.
Since being taken over by India, this former Portuguese ruled territory has been called Goa. However, this name is a misnomer and unhistorical. The Portuguese themselves never called it that, but called their territory the 'State of Portuguese India' or the 'Estado da India Portuguesa' (as it appears on my parents' travel documents). There was never anything such as a 'Goa Portuguesa', a name which, like 'Goanese,' is a vulgar corruption and demonstrative of the user's lack of intelligence.
A person from the former Portuguese territory of Bardesh, for example, such as I am, is not a 'Goan' - no more than a person from Mangalore or Kesargadh or Vishakapatnam is a Madrasi, despite being formerly from the Madras Presidency, or again a person from Karwar or Ratnagiri or Sindh or Gujarat is a Bombayite, despite being from the former Bombay Presidency, or again that a person from Bihar or Orissa is a Bengali despite being from the former Bengal Presidency. Instead, we are Konkani, together with all the other original Konkani people.
The people of the Konkan are the Konkani, and their language is of the same name. To the east of the Konkan, in the Krishna river basin lies the land of Maharashtra.
The Konkani and Marathi nations are both descended form the admixture of the Aryans and pre-Aryan Indians. However, the Konkani, in their land, are an older nation than the Marathi.
The last significant immigrants to contribute to the formation of the Konkani nation were the Saraswats - refugees from the ecological disaster that made the Saraswat river basin in the Punjab a permanent desert.
On the contrary, the Marathi nation was constituted by a much latter migration caused by Hindu dissension over North India's near en masse adoption of Buddhism, following the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka Priyadarshan's conversion to that religion.
Both languages, too, are descended from Prakrit. Again, however, Konkani is older while modern Marathi went through an intermediate stage over the last 500 years - called the Maharashtri language. As against this, the Konkani language has been nearly static over the same period, evidenced by the fact that despite the Konkani emigrancy in the Tuluva - Mangalore et al being over 400 to 300 years old, the language of both the metropolitan and emigrant communities are still inter-intelligible.
Nevertheless, despite this fact, the Marathi have the impudence to allege that Konkani is a corrupted dialect of Marathi!
Maharashtra, the home of the Marathi people, was once, long before the rise of Vijayanagar, the site of a powerful empire - Deonagar - that in much the same way was a bulwark against Islamic encroachment. Unfortunately, it also fell, to Allaudin Khilji. At that time, Bhima, the brother of the Devnagar emperor along with many Marathi refugees came down into the Konkan and settled in what is now Bombay, in the former and ancient island of Mahim, originally Mahikawati, which he made his new capital. This is how the Marathi people first came into the Konkan besides also spreading into and colonising Khandesh and Vidarbha to Maharashtra's north and east. The original Maharasthra came to be called simply as "Desh" - the Home Country.
However the first Marathi rule in the Konkan was short-lived, for the Arabs who dominated the Arabian Sea soon conquered Mahikawati along with the larger island to its south, which they called Al Omanis.
Al Omanis was, shortly after the fall of Goa to the Portuguese, also taken by them, and renamed Bom Bahia, the Good Bay, after the excellent harbour on its leeward side. Later, when a Portuguese princess married an English king, Portugal gifted Bom Bahia to the English as dowry. The English corrupted Bom Bahia to Bombay.
The Portuguese came to fight Islam and to trade. They were invited by local Hindu rulers to help in the fight against Islam, and they did that. It is alleged that they took advantage of the situation to grab territory for themselves, but it is a fact that the Portuguese did not come here to do charity and never promised merely to help evacuate a territory of the Muslims and not take the territory for themselves. It is only idiots who blame the Portuguese for grabbing the territories that they liberated.
Having gained a territory, the Portuguese began to propagate their faith. This however, together with the fact that the Portuguese did not observe similar dietary, personal toilet or social taboos, antagonised the Hindus against them and set them on a collision course. The Hindus began to foment rebellion and to entice the converts to revert to Hinduism. Again, they also began to persecute the converts and the missionaries, going so far as to murder them. In exasperation and in order both to secure the loyalty of the populations and prevent regression to Hinduism, the Portuguese began to expel the Hindus from their conquests. The abandoned temples were also, like the mosques earlier, largely converted to churches or chapels.
The Portuguese also, for the same reason, began to compel the converts to adopt Lusitanian names, surnames and customs.
The Portuguese conquests - Goa, Bardez, the northern and the southern Shasti, the Bombay, Bandra, Trombay, & Dharavi Islands, Thane, Chaul - Revdanda, Daman, Diu, New Bombay (across the Bombay harbour) etc became exclusively Christian lands, populated by converts besides the few original Christians descended from the missions of Sts. Thomas and Bartholomew, Apostles.
The policies of the Portuguese displaced large numbers, mainly into the neighbouring country on the south - Tuluva. Even here, however, the missionaries followed them and persuaded many to adopt the Christian religion and to follow Portuguese Indian practises. Later on, following the repeated depradations of Shivaji and his son Sambhaji, many Christians were also forced into relocating into Tuluva, where the policy of the local kings, wherein they solicited and encouraged the Christians from Portuguese India to settle in their lands and open forests for agriculture acted as an added incentive. As a result, the largest and oldest community of Konkani expatriates is resident in the Tuluva national homeland, mainly in and around Mangalore.
The Portuguese, in a misguided attempt, went so far as to forbid the use of Konkani and mandate the adoption of Portuguese by the general population. Despite this, and more because this policy was never actively imposed, Konkani survived in Portuguese India and in its allied state of Sawantwadi, two areas where the Marathi colonialists could not penetrate.
However, in contrast to the Portuguese, the English followed a mercantilist policy, which was basically indifferent to religion and allowed the Hindus to return to Bombay. Soon after, a Hindu woman by the name of Mumba built a temple and named it after herself, Mumbadevi - the Goddess Mumba. This is not very surprising, since the Advait Hindus believe that every soul is a god.
Under England's mercantilist policy, industries came to be set up in Bombay, and to man those factories, people were imported from the hinterlands. Thus the Marathi people began to pour into Bombay once again and soon came to dominate its demography, reducing its original Konkani people to a minority.
The Marathi with their brute majority began to idiomise the name of the city. Their name for it, Mumbai, obviously a corruption of the English Bombay, they justified as being derived from the Mumbadevi temple and they alleged according to this new mythology that this was the original name of the city. However, that is obviously impossible for the simple reason that the English entry predated the erection of this temple and also because there is not a shred of historical evidence of the use of the name of Mumbai prior to the era of English Bombay.
To the north of Bombay, the city of Vasai, named after the ancient Konkani people of the Vasas, was conquered from the Portuguese by the newly resurgent Marathi empire founded by Shivaji Bhonsale, a scion of the ancient Devnagar imperial family, the Jadhavas through his mother Jijai.
The bulk of the Vasas have resisted absorption into the Gujerati colonial community in the Far North of the Konkan - the land of Vasava - though some of the Vasas did assimilate.
The Marathi conquerors forced the native Konkani people of Vasai and its environs to take up Marathi as their language. As a result, these people became hybridised between Konkani, Portuguese, Marathi and the soon prevailing English. Some seventy years after taking the Vasai territories, the Marathi lost it to the English coming from Bombay. The now hybridised, erstwhile Konkani people renamed themselves the East Indians to honour the English East India Company which liberated them from the tyranny of the Marathi, on the occasion of the coronation anniversary of Victoria, queen of England.
The Marathi people began to assimilate the city of Bombay, and claimed that it was named after the temple of Mumbadevi. As a result of their sustained agitation, the government of India after its independence included Bombay into the newly recreated province of Maharashtra and latter also renamed the city as Mumbai, as the Marathi people demanded.
But the Marathi are not satisfied merely with colonizing the former British Konkan, they must also covet the Portuguese Konkan - the so-called "Goa". Indeed it is imperative for them to do so, in order to prevent the reclamation of the British Konkan and the attendant expulsion of the Marathi colonialists there. This imperative to consumate their crime pushes them in their program of Genocide against the Konkani nation. They wish to colonise the entire Konkan and destroy entirely the Konkani nation - commit genocide!
This Genocide takes the shape of renaming of places and of denigrating the Konkani people as somehow inferior - a corrupted branch of the Marathi people.
The imposition of Marathi and Maharashtrianized names is intended to sever the intimate and vital connection of the Konkani nation with its homeland, the Konkan, thus make the Konkani rootless. This is Genocide; it is also Imperialism and Colonialism. By these tactics, the Marathi people wish to swallow up and destroy the last vestiges of the Konkani nation and eat up their land, leaving them to be merely a memory.
In the past, when the Konkan had first begun to face this threat from the Marathi people, it was the Konkani Mauryas of Rairi and the Sawants and Ranes of Sawantwadi and the Portuguese territories that led the resistance. Today, however, it is largely the Sawants and the Ranes, besides most Hindu Konkani, who have turned traitors - Quilings and fifth columnists - collaborators with the Marathi program of Imperialism, Colonialism and Genocide directed at extinguishing their older neighbouring nation, the Konkani.
Thus, these people are prominent in the Shiv Sena, the organisation that spearheads this program of Konkani genocide.
It is time for the Konkani people to awaken from their stupor and face up to the grave peril that they face, and unite to fight the Marathi nation's encroachment on their homeland. The crimes of the Marathi nation against the Konkani nation and indeed against all their neighbours - the Kannada nation, the Gonds of Gondwana and the nation of Khandesh is justification enough to fight for the reclamation of the entire Konkan and its entire evacuation by the colonialists. Then only can we be truly free and safe.
A campaign of Konkani Irredentism - for compeling an end to the Marathi Imperialist-Colonialist Program in the Konkan and compeling the evacuation of the colonialists and their collaborators can be achieved only by the co-operation of all the Konkani peoples.
All of us - "Goan" and Mangalorean Konkani Christians, Hindu Konkani from "Goa," Tuluva, and the remnant Hindu Konkani from the former British Konkan (Ratnagiri, Sindhudurg, Raigad, Thane & Bombay districts), the Sawants and the Ranes, the Konkanastha Brahmins, the Gaud & Rajapur Saraswats, the Navaiyat and Daldi Konkani Muslims, the Vasas and other Konkani people of the Far North Konkan: Vasava and the Dangs - all of us will need to co-alesce together in order to save our nation from this peril. We will have to rise above our petty narrow differences and unite to save our common community - our Konkani nation.
The Struggle for the liberation of the Konkan is a thing greater than the petty identities of our individual sub-ethnic communities. This is even more true for the "Goans" - "Goa" must die that the Konkan can become free and live!