While mass tourism to the state is relatively new, travelling to Goa itself draws upon some older ideas of Indian life. (Express photo)
Nov 15, 2024 17:16 IST First published on: Nov 15, 2024 at 19:16 IST
The residents of Goa, a recent news report suggests (‘It’s a nuisance now: As tourists throng Goa neighbourhood, residents shut doors’, IE, November 10), are deeply unhappy about “disrespectful” tourists who intrude into residential and religious spaces for photo opportunities. No permission is taken for these activities and the images are usually posted on social media. The locals complain that this violates the right to privacy and the sanctity of sacred enclaves. There is a peculiar sense in which a very recent aspect of Indian life — mass travel for leisure as a form of consumerism — continues to carry traces of older ways of social life.
Leisure as a mass activity is a particularly post-Nehruvian era phenomenon. It marks the decline of what was no less than a moral discourse for about four decades since 1947. The Five-Year Plan worldview that dictated cultural life in those decades stigmatised consumption (of which leisure activities are part) and valourised savings. In my parents’ generation, buying another pair of shoes when the one in possession could be patched up and made to last for another few years was an idea of almost religious significance. This was a result of a very real shortage of resources as well as — and just as real — ideas regarding the moral value of not consuming now to save for a better future.
Till around the late 1980s, the heroic figure of Indian public culture was the non-consumer: The filmic doctor and the engineer involved in “nation-building”; the ascetically clothed Mahatma Gandhi’s attire; and Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri hailing the Jawan (the common soldier) and the Kisan (the farmer). A small group of Indians — the economic and social elite — did, of course, take part in “non-productive” activities but the rest of the population was an audience rather than a participant in their consumerist pastimes. It watched films about families with mansions that had grand staircases and custard was served for dessert at birthday parties. Most of the Indian population was asked to consume ascetic nationalism and was happy to do so.
From the turn of the century, however, there has been a great change. Consumerism has taken on a positive value. The “saver” disappears as an icon of nationalist imagination and “the consumer” becomes a heroic figure, applauded and emulated. Both on-screen and in actual life, common men and women now take part in leisure activities in picturesque Swiss towns such as Interlaken. Goods and commodities become significant aspects of self-definition and intimacies and desolation are now acted out as much at Lake Como as at Brindavan Gardens in Mysuru. From being part of a developmentalist modernity, there is a seamless — and enthusiastic — transition to consumerist modernity. This democratisation of leisure has also led to the rise of a vibrant domestic tourism sector. Airports now resemble train and bus termini and travel is no longer restricted to visits to homes of extended family or pilgrimage-related mobility.
Goa is, of course, a favoured destination for the domestic tourist. However, while mass tourism to the state is relatively new, travelling to Goa itself draws upon some older ideas of Indian life.
The first is Goa as a place in the Indian imagination, one that has developed through several decades of public talk about Goan-ness, not least through cinema. In this sphere of imagining Goan-ness by non-Goans, the former have no interior life. Their lives are mostly, if not exclusively, a series of public events: They enjoy alcohol publicly, play music and dance in the open, and, of course, take part in public displays of affection. It is a view we have been socialised into over several decades and forms a significant part of tourist behaviour in Goa. If an entire population is imagined as not having a life beyond what we can see, then it becomes natural to dismiss its right to privacy. Its homes and religious places become fair game as sites that can be exposed to public life on social media without permission as they are, in any case, public. And since, as the thinking goes, Goans — unlike others — actually revel in their public-ness, why would it matter that they are photographed without consent?
The idea of Goans as a mainly “public” people is also linked to their exoticisation as a “foreign” people. We travel to Goa to view exotica at our doorstep. The problem with the idea of the “exotic” is that it makes populations one-dimensional. In the eyes of the observer, the exotic is so strange that it can be treated in a manner very different from those we would regard as kindred. Christianity is, of course, part of the exoticisation of Goa and Goans. The exoticised person becomes an object with no particular life of its own, apart from the one we give it.
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The everyday exoticisation of Goa means a little more than just tourists annoying locals. It has something to tell us about how we have — or have not — learnt to deal with difference. India may be a country with many different languages, religions and ethnicities, however, a very new activity (that of tourism) continues to be enacted through the lenses of majoritarianism. We interact with those who are different from us through our own frameworks of beliefs and behaviours. This establishes ideas about “normal” cultures and others that can be treated in a manner that is beyond the norm.
It would be easy to say: “This is just what tourists do everywhere” and, indeed, tourists — because they are among strangers — can be insensitive. However, the histories of “Indian” relationship with “foreign” Goa suggests that there is a bit more to it than just the usual tourist behaviour. This history is linked to one of caricatures: “Goans only have surfaces and no depth, just public lives and nothing intimate and private.” Entirely new technologies and contexts — social media, the internet, Instagram — have led to an opening up of new fields of leisure but not necessarily changed older ways of thinking about the world.
The writer is British Academy Global Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London.
