In contrast to other European colonisers, the Portuguese tried to accept India as their land and tried to assimilate with native inhabitants
On the eve of India’s 78th Independence Day, in the words of Dr Helle Jorgensen, a Lecturer in Cultural Heritage Studies at the Department of History of the University of Birmingham, UK:
“When India gained independence in 1947, its Independence Day ceremonies became a prototype setting the standard for marking and ritualising imperial withdrawal and achievement of sovereignty in former colonies across the world.” (Jorgensen, 2023).
According to the Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2024: “Independence Day marks the end of British rule in 1947, brought about by the Indian Independence Act of July 18 that year, and the establishment of a free and independent Indian nation.”
Further, according to Dr Helle Jorgensen in her journal article entitled: Commemorative Public Holidays and Postcolonial Imaginaries… published in the ‘The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History’ on 27 Apr 2023: “If India has featured prominently in theorising the significance of the ritualised celebration of Independence Day and related national holidays, then this has been from a particular vantage point: That of independence from British rule. Yet this historical perspective far from exhausts the relevant field of post/colonial relations and imaginaries on India and its independence.”
Some academically sound justifications for the propagation of Indian Independence Day commemorations, include: While recurrent, they occur only once every year, and they are normally too intrusive in everyday life to pass unnoticed. At the same time, official explanations of their meaning often invite competing interpretations, making national days the object of symbolic struggle and capture.” (Becker and Lentz, 2013)
“Analysing the celebration of national holidays such as Independence Day can serve as a revealing lens of refraction for wider postcolonial imaginaries and relations, since ‘[i]ndependence (…) encompasses national symbols, meanings, collective memory and the everyday. It is a contestable and complex, emotionally laden idea (…) that can be mobilized in contradictory ways’.” (Paasi, 2016).
Incidentally, there has to be a tipping point in Goa’s transverse concurrence with the observance of the Indian Independence Day.
Post-Colonialism: In furtherance, the Dallas Baptist University in its webpage entitled: “Key Terms in Post-Colonial Theory” has concisely spelt out what post-colonialism entails:
“Broadly a study of the effects of colonialism on cultures and societies. It is concerned with both how European nations conquered and controlled "Third World" cultures and how these groups have since responded to and resisted those encroachments. Post-colonialism, as both a body of theory and a study of political and cultural change, has gone and continues to go through three broad stages:
initial awareness of the social, psychological, and cultural inferiority enforced by being in a colonized state; the struggle for ethnic, cultural, and political autonomy; a growing awareness of cultural overlap and hybridity.
Ambivalence: “Tranversally, it would also be relevant to elucidate upon the term ambivalence:
Which defines as the ambiguous way in which colonizer and colonized regard one another. The colonizer often regards the colonized as both inferior yet exotically other, while the colonized regards the colonizer as both enviable yet corrupt. In a context of hybridity, this often produces a mixed sense of blessing and curse.” (Dallas Baptist University, 2024).
From a Indo-Portuguese perspective: According to Susheel Kumar Sharma in his article entitled: “Revisiting Portuguese Colonization in India” (2017) published in the Research Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences neatly records the instances of Colonial glory:
“The Portuguese were the first European colonizers to arrive in India but the last to leave.
In contrast to the other European colonisers in India the Portuguese tried to accept India as their land and tried to assimilate themselves with the native inhabitants.
It is but natural that the Portuguese tried to do many “good things” for India. For example, they introduced several crops like potato, tomato, sugar potato, capsicum and chillies, tobacco, red kidney bean (rajma), coffee, tapioca, groundnuts, corn, papaya, pineapple, guava, avocado, cashew, sapota (chikoo) and superior plantation varieties of coconut.
They not only constructed new roads and developed irrigation facilities but also helped the traders in marketing their products in the entire Indian Ocean.
They also introduced various cuisines like toasts and sandwiches, cottage cheese, vindaloo, balchao, sorpotel, sausages, sweet Goan wine and various kinds of loaves like round gutli and flat pav.
They also contributed in the field of music, dance, painting, carving and sculpture.
Printing operations were started by them in Goa in 1556; books were printed in Tamil and Devanagari fonts on imported paper from Portugal around 1579; the first ever catalogue of the Indian plants was published in 1563; 86 dictionaries, 115 grammar books and 45 journals in 73 languages of India were produced by the Portuguese.
Fr. Thomas Stephens (1549-1619) produced the first “Konkani Grammar” and Fr. Diogo Ribero (1560-1633) published the first dictionary in Konkani in two volumes in 1626.
Despite all their “good work” and their efforts at assimilation the colonial impact of Portuguese in the form of official language is nowhere to be found in today's India.” (Sharma, 2017).
Modern Interpretation of Post-Colonialism: As per the famous Poem by Jamaican poet: Louise Bennett-Coverley entitled: Colonization In Reverse (1966) suggested that migration to Britain was the initial, foundational challenge to the imperial system that had heretofore structured the world of the colonized.
That in laying claim to the rights of passage from the periphery to the metropolis, colonized and postcolonial subjects sought to dismantle the political, economic, and epistemological hierarchies on which imperialism rested. Migrants from the Commonwealth forced former colonial nations to confront the decentering experiences undergone by colonized peoples for centuries. (as read in “Colonization in Reverse: An Introduction.” by Ashely Dawson, 2007).
Hence, the solution could be found in the concept of hybridity, which postulates: “catalysis: the (specifically New World) experience of several ethnic groups interacting and mixing with each other often in a contentious environment that gives way to new forms of identity and experience.” (DBU, 2024).
