From an ‘Outside’ Close to Home?

Perhaps it is inevitable that anthologies on Goa always tend to sound like they are addressed and written for an ‘outside’ world, an outside that can be found close to home, on Goa’s beachfront. Any region that in popular stereotype is ‘not like India’ is in danger of being condemned to permanent ethnography, explaining its difference over and over, usually in exactly the terms desired by the cultural mainstream. In all fairness, Reflected in Water, a Penguin anthology of Writings on Goa edited by Jerry Pinto, is kaleidoscopic in its inclusions and balances, and cannot be accused of having produced an anthology that has Goa pirouetting to a set tune for the alien eye. Perhaps this selection mirrors Pinto’s own process of knowing Goa, as his introduction suggests, as a distanced quasi-insider, as most expatriate Goans are. The distinction drawn here is not exactly the one between Goan and non-Goan or the authentic against the inauthentic, but more an attempt to indicate how symptomatic this anthology is of the way in which Goa is situated in relation to India and the world (with the tourist industry helping to conflate the distance between India and the world).

One can scarcely think of a similar anthology on Bihar or Bengal or Kerala that allows this portion of the canvas to one-time hippies, stray tourists, travelers and a convalescing racist Englishman. In all probability, the availability of writing and translations in English brings its own constraints to anyone putting together this considerable range of forty-four essays. It is a little deflating however, to see some essays and excerpts faithfully deliver the tried and tested cultural handles through which Goa is repetitively represented.