Representing ‘Otherness’: A Postcolonial Reading of Asif Currimbhoy’s Goa
Abstract
With a view to exploring the emergence of a composite conception of Indian subjectivity and its political-cultural implications, the present paper attempts a re-reading of Asif Currimbhoy’s Goa. Currimbhoy as a dramatist stretched his material beyond the confines of the particular to produce an imaginative re-creation of the individual in conflict with the social and political system. Thus he interweaves the private with the public to create drama which asks moral questions during the time of de-colonization, and Goa is perhaps the finest example of the genre. Set against the backdrop of Goa’s disintegration during its liberation from colonial rule, it addresses the problematic of Indian subjectivity on the axes of race and colour distinction and articulates a discourse of resistance against the colonial discourse inextricably linked with the imperialist power politics. Within the framework of a story centering round the romance of an Indian boy and a Goan girl, it enacts the last stages of a dying colonialism through symbolic characters embodying historical and social forces. It animates the dichotomy between the self and other by highlighting colour distinction as a parameter of racist analysis in the postcolonial world.
Keywords: Race, Colour, De-colonization, Subjectivity, Self, Other, Resistance
“Others may have followed, but Currimbhoy is India’s first authentic voice in the theatre. He has written that country’s first plays of dissent. He presents life as it is, not as something it should be, the age-old curse of India’s classical theatre.” (Bowers xii)
Asif Currimbhoy, along with Girish Karnad and Vijay Tendulkar, addresses the problematic of contemporary Indian subjectivity on the various axes of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, history, politics, tradition and socio-cultural change. Currimbhoy occupies a prominent place in Indian English Theatre because of his experimentation not only with the subject matter, but also with the form and structure of drama. Beginning his career in the mid-fifties, this prolific playwright has more than thirty plays to his credit, most of which are, “… substantial in context and rich in theatrical devices” (Gokhale 340). The themes from his dramas are "from the flow of contemporary life and politics" (Nandakumar 86-7). He gathers his material from a distinctly Indian experience and weaves various threads into it, from the myth of yore as well as contemporary society. In fact, Currimbhoy has written plays on a vast array of subjects such as history, current politics and socio-economic problems; the East-west encounter, Psychological problems, philosophical ideas, religious themes and art. He successfully ventures in unveiling the multiple facets of contemporary Indian subjectivity and thus brings a new wave to the current of Indo-English theatre. So far the technical innovations are concerned; he brilliantly succeeds in producing "Actable" plays. Currimbhoy gave more importance to the performing aspects of drama, as it is a visual aid to understand the events and the people than the literary aspects, which may increase the knowledge of the plays in theory. He uses theatrical devices like loudspeakers, radios, shadow cut-out, pantomime, puppets and lyrical effects and symbolic properties like storm-scenes, poetic speech, monologue, choruses, to have the fullest authority and impact over the audience; bringing at the same time, the quintessential ‘realism’. But he was ignored in India until the news of the reputation he enjoyed in the United States reached the country. He got his start in 1965 nearly after fifteen years of writing without ever seeing a single play of him produced in India; the University of Michigan staged his Goa. Three years later it was staged at the Martinique Theatre on Broadway. The Theatre Company in Boston exhibited The Hungry Ones, and others La Mama and the British Drama League staged the Dumb Dancer with Kathakali dancers. The Doldrummers were given a try out at the actor’s studio but it was banned in India. It was only in 1969, after writers like Khushwant Singh and Mulk Raj Anand wrote letters of protest to the Times of India, that the ban was lifted and the Little Theatre group in Delhi staged it. Shanta Gokhale has revealed that Currimbhoy was “… emerging more and more clearly as a playwright of international stature” (Gokhale 341).
Currimbhoy stretched his material beyond the confines of the particular to produce an imaginative re-creation of the individual in conflict with the social and political system. To quote Peter Nazareth, “Asif Currimbhoy interweaves the public event with the private to create exciting drama which asks moral questions about humanity in the cataclysmic period of de-colonisation” (Nazareth 18). As Currimbhoy says in an interview, "I am sympathetic to the human condition which is really fairly universal in any part of the world. But human condition exists in an environment. And environment always brings about its own pressures" (Paul and Jacob 48). Currimbhoy claims that “good theatre does not depend upon language or geography; rather it depends upon inherent situations, and of course, conflict…” (Iyer 104), and it is conflict at the meeting point between the public and the private, the historical moment and the individual, which is the basis of all his works:
Asif like Bernard Shaw was of the view that theatre as ideal entertainment gives way to an understanding of the necessity of art as a contributing factor in the search for insight and to an understanding of man’s essential role in discovering values which sustain his dignity. His plays are used as vehicles to convey political and social values. He has succeeded in reconciling a moving exploration of credible human situation and action and urgent social change. He seeks to express his vision of man – man as a creature of passion with potentialities for nobility as well as destruction. Man the ideal and the degenerate and out this conflict he creates plays that are vitally alive. (Ibid)
The present paper undertakes a study of Currimbhoy’s Goa with a view to exploring the emergence of a composite conception of Indian subjectivity and its political-cultural implications. Goa: A Tragedy (1970) is, as Martin Banham observes, “an allegorical play relating to the Indian take over of the Portuguese enclave, with all the action centered upon ‘the patio’—which is the stage upon which all the world goes by” (87). The play opens with the encounter of the dramatist with his friend Mario, the Portuguese local Administrator who praises a Goan village nestling amidst green hills and valleys. It is evening and the ‘regulars’ meet at the ‘patio’ benches. While Senhora Miranda, a fair-looking prostitute of about forty, walks into her house on the east side of the stage, Krishna, a young Indian at the "patio" looks at Miranda’s daughter, Rose, "dark looking and about fourteen with a beautiful innocent face and a strange voice"( Currimbhoy 14). She seems to tell the young man: "It's getting dark now. I can see your lips no longer: I do not know what you say. . . . But my heart is full of love . . . and I would love . . . this secrecy. . . ." (Currimbhoy 15). The action in the next scene takes place in the house of Senhora Miranda. She has migrated to Goa where she leads a happy sexual life with the natives. Though Senhora Miranda has many customers as a prostitute, she purely loves Alphonso because both of them belong to Portugal and also that he is very rich. Alphonso usually gives gifts to Miranda. When she introduces her daughter Rose to him, he calls her the fairest flower in the whole world and says that "Rose is Goa. Goa is Rose" (Currimbhoy 34). These words are significant in as much as they alert the mind to "the coiled symbolism of the play" (Iyenger 245). Krishna unfolds Miranda that he loves Rose and says that "I've waited for her too long. It took care and patience, and long years of understanding. You see, we had something in common. It rhymed; it matched. But it was more than that. I love her. (Currimbhoy 42) But Miranda does not like him for her daughter. As Alphonso too wants Rose, there is a dispute between Alphonso and Krishna. Alphonso could not bear the love of Krishna on Rose so he beats him but Krishna does not get afraid of him and tells him "I said I stay here. I've taken your place" (Currimbhoy 64). Alphonso thinks that Krishna is interested in Miranda. Indeed he loves her daughter Rose. Though Rose loves Krishna, she is not allowed to meet him because Miranda does not like her to be Krishna's girl. As he can not control his wrath, he kills Alphonso in the bar and enters Miranda’s house. The scene becomes unbearably horrible when we come to know that Senhora Miranda had been raped by a foreigner and therefore, she wanted Rose, the child of violence and oppression to have the same destiny. Dramatically, the scene evades logical progression of reason and action when Krishna explains the reason behind Senhora Miranda’s agency to get Rose brutally raped: “You . . . dangled Rose before us, not through competition for you, but for her. Made us whore with you, not for yourself, but for her. Used us, not to rape one who had already been raped, but to rape one who had not been raped!” (Currimbhoy 69). Krishna is filled with hatred both for the mother and the daughter. He corners the mother thus: “Pour your hate not on me but on Rose. Relieve yourself of this guilt through Rose. For she was the cause of it all. Then remember; did she scream like you? Feel your pain and horror. For then only she becomes you” (Currimbhoy 69). This logic drives Miranda into delirium and she helps Krishna to rape Rose. Rose, the epitome of Goa, thus gets raped by a native, Krishna on 18th December 1961, symbolically enough, on the very the day on which Goa was invaded. Finally both the mother and daughter have turned up to be prostitutes.
Goa enacts the last stages of a dying colonialism through symbolic characters embodying historical and social forces. Of course, it was not a self-conscious attempt on the part of the dramatist to add a political dimension to the plot. As Currimbhoy admits: "For me it started out as a love story … but how my subconscious operated and whether it corrected itself or not, I do not know. I know many people have given many interpretations" (Paul and Jacob 48). He has spotlighted on love and romance between Krishna and Rose rather than writing on political events of Goa and Portuguese though the political situation has a great collision on the lives the main characters. As his name suggests, Krishna represents India, or the Indian spirit personified in all its contradictions. And Rose stands for Goa. Rose is fourteen years old and she is the child of a half-Portuguese mother and a native father. By 1961 Goa, too, had lived through fourteen years of slavery even after India had won her independence in 1947. Krishna's waiting for fourteen years for Rose, thus, symbolizes India's waiting for fourteen years (1947 to 1961) for Goa to become one with it. Rose is pure in herself and beautiful but like Goa, her innocence is precarious. She is raped by Krishna and Goa is invaded by India. With her rape she is led from a life of innocence to a life of experience. She becomes a prostitute symbolizing the fate of Goa after the invasion. Lost in gloom and despondency "she wants . . . only darkness. She wants to hear . . . only silence." With her eyes and ears closed, she is at the end, "like some living quivering animal that lies helplessly in the dark”(Currimbhoy 80).
Thus the play presents a pen picture of Goa’s disintegration from the Portuguese. Based on this historical occurrence, Goa addresses the problematic of Indian subjectivity on the axes of race and colour distinction and articulates a discourse of resistance against the colonial discourse inextricably linked with the imperialist power politics. “Asif Currimbhoy has in a roundabout way mentions how the colonialism still dominates in India by the names of love, lust and romance.” This seemingly simple love story develops with symbolic dimensions into a strange and terrifying play of deep emotions and uncontrollable forces. “Within the framework of a story centering round the romance of an Indian boy and a Goan girl”, as P.B. Reddy opines, “the dramatist highlights colonialism and colour prejudice in a light ironic vein”.
As many postcolonial theorists argued, colonialism was premised upon the absolute ‘otherness’ of the Other. The European treated and imagined the native as ‘Other’. The entire colonial discourse is based on us/them binary, where the European stood for the defining self and the native for the defined ‘they’. This meant that the power of defining, and eventually of governing the savage Other rested with the European. Edward Said’s Orientalism is a specific expose of this politics of Western Ethnocentrism:
Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (Said 20)
Drawing upon Michael Foucault’s notion of the discursive production of knowledge which in turn is inextricably connected with the operations of power, Said demonstrates how knowledge about ‘the Orient’ was fabricated and circulated in Europe and which subsequently became the basis of the process of colonization.
Colour is claimed as a major signifier for racial identity. Colonial discourses frequently represented black peoples as primitive and degenerate, having no culture of any real worth. In colonial discourses, blackness has been frequently evoked as the ultimate sign of the colonised’s ‘racial’ degeneracy. In the nineteenth century, throughout Europe it was commonly believed that the world’s population existed as a hierarchy of ‘races’ based upon colour, with white Europeans deemed the most civilized and black Africans as the most savage. In his Black Skin, White Masks (1967), Frantz Fanon, one of the pioneers of postcolonial criticism, argued that colonialism unsettled the psyche of the colonised by obliterating their sense of self and thus gave rise to a deep rooted inferiority complex. What is more, racial superiority is easily translated into class terms. Fanon’s powerful critique of colonialism The Wretched of the Earth demonstrates how the notions of racial hierarchy robustly inflected the capitalist exploitation: “Western bourgeois’ racial prejudice as regards the nigger and the Arab is racism of contempt; it is a racism which minimizes what it hates . . . . The racial prejudice of the young national bourgeoisie is racism of defence, based on fear” (Fanon 131).
Capitalism, in its turn, intensifies racial divide only to facilitate production and profit. Thus, the subalternization of a section of people of the world on the basis of colour and the interests of capital worked in the culture of colonization and imperial power politics, which give birth to self/other dichotomy in multiple dimensions.
A close reading of Currimbhoy’s Goa reveals that the play moves on this transverse parallelism between the ‘black’ and the ‘white’. The names of the characters in the play are testimonial to their racial identity and correspond to this dichotomy. While the name Krishna stands for the black, the names Alphonso and Senhora Miranda represent the Portugese whites. However, Krishna possesses within himself, as Miranda points out, the binary opposites, which may be read as counter-discourse subverting the colonial discourse on colour difference by inverting the hierarchy implicit in it:
SENHORA MIRANDA. You are not soft, Krishna; you’re hard.
KRISHNA. Soft…to Rose.
SENHORA MIRANDA. You don’t have love, Krishna. You have hate.
KRISHNA. Love…for Rose.
SENHORA MIRANDA. You’re not peaceful Krishna; you’re violent.
KRISHNA. Peaceful…to Rose.
SENHORA MIRANDA. (Pause) Is that…how Rose sees you, Krishna?
KRISHNA. Yes. (Currimbhoy 59)
As noted before, Senhora Miranda represents the white Portuguese and seems to epitomize the racial hatred of the white colonizers to the black natives: “They make me feel dirty” (Currimbhoy 37). She remains obsessed with her Portuguese ancestry and yearns to be in Lisbon: “Lisbon. Lisbon. How musical it sounds. How different I feel. . . . I hope, naturally. Perhaps even more because it sounds so unreal. But I want it so” (Currimbhoy 31). Her idealization of her Motherland manifests her heightened consciousness of racial hierarchy. For Yoosaph A.K., “Miranda’s derisive attitude to the dark-skinned and her consciousness about the skin colour seem to have given her more self-confidence creating a sense of inferiority in the colonised. Her scathing remarks would have accelerated the colonised’s internalisation of the coloniser’s notion about the colonized that they are inferior and underprivileged”. Miranda’s colour prejudice extends even to her daughter, as she claims, “Only I am fair, and she’s dark” (Currimbhoy 34). Even the traditional maternal attitude is destabilized by colour difference: “She came from my womb. Dark and bloody as the night when she was conceived. Oh the pain; the dreadful pain. They say it should give rise to love when it’s cut out from your own flesh. But the colour is different. A constant reminder” (Currimbhoy 34).
In Portuguese colonized Goa, Krishna, the black native, is looked upon as a stranger and alien by the Portuguese. He was rejected and neglected by Senhora Miranda because of the popular colonial equation that white is neat and black dirty: “He is a stranger here. I can make it out. He is not like the others. Dark, yes, but not like the others” (Currimbhoy 43).
Yoosaph A. K.’s apt comment on Miranda’s racial hatred and colour prejudice is worth quoting here: “Her judgement dwells upon the whites’ prejudiced notion about the black with the perception that coloured skin is an original sin and is “congenital” that passes from generation to generation. Her observation justifies the Westerners’ notion about the black as those who were born with blackness about them. Miranda asserts this notion of the whites about the biological presence of darkness in the black skinned people, for degrading them and achieving a relative upper hand in political affairs of the colonies.” Rose, Miranda’s own daughter, bears much more the bruises of her mother’s racial hatred. Miranda’s “ interior colonization of Rose is reflected in the political colonization of Goa with her justification that the dark color is inherited and so must be obedient to the white that is why she does not want to leave the place.”
Krishna, however, challenges this notion of colour distinction and compares the whites to albinos: “You may have white skin, but so also have albinos. It doesn’t prove a thing” (Currimbhoy 56). He reminds Miranda of the inherent “Shades of blackness” within her: “What you fear is only yourself, Maria. . . . It comes from within. From the darkest recesses of your own soul. . . . From all you want to hide about your real self; from all you want to tear out of others” (Currimbhoy 56). Yoosaph A.K. is of the opinion that
Krishna’s comparison of the white to that of albinos is presented as a paradigm of protest of the black-skinned against white discrimination. This protest against Miranda is not only for his own sake but for the sake of Rose also with the primary observation that the whites are not at all different from the blacks and that they have blackness inside them. Moreover, his metaphor has another connotation that like the albinos the ‘whites’ lack colour, which may mean that they lack the pigment that they essentially require for their life suggesting not just the absence of pigment but the absence of the self itself. Essentially, it must be the consciousness of the “other” about the “self” that lacks in the necessary presence of the other.
Currimbhoy as a dramatist always curved theatre out of political events that boggle with moral imagination and Goa is perhaps the finest example of the genre. Set against the backdrop of Goa’s disintegration during its liberation from colonial rule, it animates the dichotomy between the self and other by highlighting colour distinction as a parameter of racist analysis in the postcolonial world with its dichotomy between self and the other.
Works Cited