Languages
evolve, words are borrowed from one language to another, and as time passes by some
words acquire new meanings while others are abandoned altogether. What words
mean can tell us about the things that they represent. Thus, for instance, a
word like ‘communidade’ can tell us not just that it represents a system of
land tenure, but also indicate that this
system was either created or modified through the intervention of the
Portuguese. But this process of deploying semantics for understanding and
explaining the larger processes of history is not easy, fraught as it is with
inconsistencies that may lead us to errors.
The occasion to
have these thoughts was recently provided when I came across an interesting
documentary on the Goan music and dance form manddo, ‘Amchem Cantar Aum Mhuntam’, by Ruth Lobo, a graduate of
the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. This documentary is available
online (it was released on 15 September, 2015). The purpose of this article is
not to review the documentary. Rather, I would like to focus on two comments
that the documentary provides on the history of the origins of the manddo, in a bid to reflect how Goan
history is understood in the popular domain.
The first
comment is by the cardiologist and manddo-enthusiast,
Dr. Francisco Colaco (also a Herald columnist).
On the origins of the manddo Dr.
Colaco has this to say, taking stock of the socio-political conditions
prevailing in the nineteenth century, “The
manddo came [into existence] because
Goa was going through troubled times. There was a feudal society…these people
who belonged to the elite – especially the Brahmin and the Chardos – they
wanted to live in a world of their own. It was a fanciful world that would
bring them…consolation. So composers started composing and dancers started
dancing”. Dr. Colaco further states that the mandde were sung at weddings where the bride had to sing,
surrounded by the guests in the ballroom, where marriages were generally
celebrated. According to Dr. Colaco it was from the arrangement of people or “mandavoll” in Konkani, the word manddo came into existence.
What we can
immediately understand from Dr. Colaco’s comment is the importance of the
historically accurate context for the emergence of the manddo. Indeed, it were the Catholic elite in the nineteenth
century, who, imagining themselves as having a Hindu ancestry, created a form
of art with the amalgamation of eastern and western characteristics. Thus, the song “Hanv
saiba poltoddi vhoitam…”, though a dekhnni,
sung by Catholics, which has a kalavant
and a boatman as the main characters is a good illustration of the syncretic
project and developed on similar lines as the manddo. Of course the fights amongst the Catholic
Brahmin and Chardo factions, and also with the Portuguese government for power
also provided the political context – the “troubled times” that Dr. Colaco
alludes to – for the emergence of the manddo.
For the manddo is an invention of the
nineteenth century.
Immediately
following the claim of Dr. Colaco, the documentary juxtaposes a counter-claim,
by Prajal Sakhardande, who teaches history at the Dhempe College of Arts and
Science, Panjim. “The word manddo comes
from the word mandd”, he says. “Mandd is the village square – the sacred
village square – where…shigmo and
other performances took place. So it [manddo]
has come from there. I do not believe it is mandavoll…”
One is a bit
confused after listening to Sakhardande, because his interpretation seems to
ignore all known historical facts pertaining to the origin of the manddo. One wonders what nineteenth
century Catholic elites would have to do with the mandd, since the manddo even
today is not sung on the mandd,
neither has the manddo any ritual
significance – unlike ceremonies performed on the mandd do. The manddo emerged
in elite, landlord settings whether in urban centers like Margao, or in
villages like Benaulim and Curtorim in Salcette. The mandd is especially used by bahujan and tribal communities for
religious/ritual purposes. Of late Christian tribal communities – such as
those in Quepem – have started working towards a cultural revival of the mandd, in order to assert a
Christian-tribal identity. Thus, the mandd
seems to be restricted to certain communities and ritual practices, and is related
to historical processes that one can easily pin-point.
To be fair, both
Dr. Colaco and Sakhardande use semantics to understand the history of the manddo. While the former grounds his
understanding in known history, the latter seems to be giving merely an
arbitrary opinion buttressed by a general desire to locate Goan authenticity in
a pre-colonial Hindu past. Such a model of understanding history and culture
was used from the nineteenth century by British orientalists and philologists,
and civil servants. Following the popularity of Romanticism the assumption was
that historical memory best survived in the grammar and semantics of languages,
which can provide evidence for the history and culture of peoples.
The larger issue
that we can broach here is that more often than not, Goan history is attempted
to be pushed back in time, that is, to before the Portuguese rule. If such a
popular narrative is existent, one needs to seek the possibility of its
correspondence with known historical facts and reality. If such an exercise is
not carried out what we have is a history that is overpowered by mythical
narratives. A good example will be of how Goan history always begins with the
myth of Parashuram. Rather, as we have seen in the case of the manddo, there is a way out of
avoiding the mythification of history.
See also 'Dancing to the Same Old Tune', here.
(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 13 April, 2016)
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