A book shop,
Broadway book house where we book-worms come out on the third Thursday of every month, to share our crumbs.
Sometimes we get to meet the cook, here was one such occasion.
Here was an interaction with author Mr.Raghuraman Trichur whose book Redefining Goa was published by Goa 1556. I have not read the book, but the topic did sound interesting.
But what did come across to me during the entire interaction were the potential areas where we need to look at culture. More interestingly the unique identity of Goa, well coming to think of it, until 1961 Goa was pretty uninvolved with rest of India, since rest of India had a common master in the Brits, there is a semblance of commonality and a pretence of cultural unity. Mr.Trichur claims to have worked on a skeleton on the Goan society based on the path of Merchant capital history through which he could further look at various anthropological journey.
But as the conversation went to Mundkar- Bhatkar issue, I found that the issues that coastal Karnataka is grappling with are identical. The absence of the peasantry and the peasant history, again as advocate Albertina Almeida pointed would not be found in the annals of academician but would be in alternate documentation which are not really acceptable to the academic elite.
This entire dialogues that have been happening with Dr.Romilla Thapar, or Mr.Trichur, or Dr.Gadgil there is a subcutaneous thought that nationalism as it was and is perceived is colonialism in its own self. This according to Mr.Trichur includes the tourism for, with the advent of tourists, the peasantry directly engaged with the tourist, which translated to direct income that was free of the landlord.
When we talk of social issues they are all interrelated, be it the right of a family to live in their hereditary plots, women’s issue, and the issue of non-goan takeover of the beach belt. These are multilayered interwoven issues. Well it did sound very interesting
There were participants who could actually point lacunae’s the disconnect, the un-addressed issues of Goa. That was heartening I could hear the potential for three more books. 🙂
The most elegant aspect …yes elegant of the evening was Jason Keith, very apt, kept the flow managed the interruptions without being offensive, aggressive or condescending.
Maybe I shall borrow the book and read it.
My Bookshelf 