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ARUN SINHA
Beyond Cliches
This chronicler of Goa looks beyond the postcard edges, where the image
of the state is displayed and replayed as surf, sand, sun and fun. In
Goa Indica: A Critical Portrait of Postcolonial Goa (Bibliophile South
Asia and Promilla & Co), Arun Sinha, 48, undermines these cliches
to detail certain other currents and cross-currents-the socio-economic
ones that shaped Goan society. "The progress of the state is astonishing
when you realise that it was freed from colonial rule 14 years after the
rest of India was," says Sinha. But the state of multiculturalism,
which experienced a high after tourist inflow, suffered in many ways-concrete
buildings jutted in and pollution and the erosion of native Goan culture
ruined even the postcard picture. "Goans are awakening to the fact
that they have to stop and change the course of development," says
Sinha.
Sinha, who has grabbed headlines with investigative reports and is the
editor of The Navhind Times, is ironically, disillusioned with Indian
journalism. He calls it, tongue-in-cheek, "funalism" and uses
his books to attack "the fathers of funalism". Goa Indica is
"one good shot at it". Goa is a metaphor that refuses to exhaust
for him-he has parodied it and historicised it. In his comic novel, The
Hedonist Empire, Goa in the last days of Portuguese rule, was a symbol
of the "ultimate land for sinners".
In his first book, Against the Few, Sinha had declared his aim as an
author-to "blend the rigours of academic research with the joys of
literature". This is affirmed in Goa Indica. As he decodes the multifarious
aspects of the state-the tourism boom triggered by the hippies ("In
the 1960s and '70s, the Goa government had not done anything to attract
tourists to the beaches. It was the young white nude female who had done
it for them."); the use of Konkani ("a political tool to establish
Goan control over Goan resources"); the activist role of the church
("an illusion") and the common civil code that exists only in
Goa-it is history unlaced with nostalgia but honed with a journalist's
notepad of facts.
-Farzand Ahmed
 
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As Iraq flares up...
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ISSUE MARCH 31, 2003
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