Funeral of fun

The government killed the traditional carnival of Goa

It was once synonymous with spontaneity. In the three days of sheer fun, men and women would disguise themselves, raid each other’s homes, throw talcum powder and streamers on each other, dance around bonfires and sing love songs. Sigh! It was the ghost of a festival that fitted across Goa during the Intruz Carnival this February.
Fun fled, leaving the carnival to commercialism and canned western pop culture. Many Goans felt sad about the loss of native flavour of the festival, and the Brazilian-style parades sponsored by the state government hurt them more.
The parades, depicting the Goan male as a whisky-toting beachcomber and the woman as a dancing moll, were true to the Bollywood distortion of Goa as a pleasure land of booze and loose women.
Such crude images first invaded the Intruz in the early eighties when the government introduced floats to attract tourists. Till then floats were never a part of the carnival, which and its roots in a Roman agricultural festival that forgot social ranks and let the slaves dine with their masters. The carnival came to Goa in the 16^th Century from Portugal.
The carnival, or Carnival as it is popularly called, had a pure fur-filled charm till the sixties. The streets overflowed with people in colourful masks, men and women wearing each other’s clothes, and boys serenading their sweethearts with guitars and mandolins, crooning the romantic fados (Portuguese love songs).
On the last day of the carnival was the assalto: a group of people would storm into a friend’s house, douse them with water and smear indigo powder on them, raid the larder and carry away the delicacies. The friends, having failed to stop them with bucketful of water and packets of sand and sawdust, would follow the assalto party to its next target. By noon the size of the group would have swelled, and so too the booty, which would be polished off amid open-air dancing and singing.
Much of that was distinctly Portuguese but there was a strong local flavour too: large groups of the Kunnbi tribals danced the trance-like fugddi on the streets, the women with flowers braided on their hair, the men beating cymbals and the ghumot, a drum made of mud and snakeskin. The villagers performed folk plays called khells, the first play invariably at the headman’s porch.
The khell was a delicious mix of humour and romance, and all the plays had a landlord and a padre whose cook was madly in love with the landlord’s maid.
Romance of the carnivals began fading when the government conjured up a commercial festival, allowed sponsored floats and huge cutouts of liquor brands to make money and hired dancing girls in skimpy clothes for tourist titillation. The floats progressively became less Goan and more Brazilian, and samba dancers and live bands dominated the show.
The carnival parade overshadowed the traditional Intruz, and the original merrymakers eventually were reduced to mere spectators. Forgetting their own Intruz fun they flocked to the towns to watch the spectacle inside bamboo barricades protected by truncheon wielding policemen. A people’s festival had degenerated into a state-organised tamasha.
A few women’s groups and the church had persuaded people to boycott the foul floats when the government introduced them in the eighties. Protest against commercialisation took a different form this year, with two Margoa municipal councillors, Vijay Sardessai and Jose Francisco Gomes, organising a parallel carnival in the town in a bid to revive the traditional Intruz. It turned out to be merrier than the government show at Panjim and certainly truer to tradition.
Another happy development was the spontaneous celebration of the festival at the twilight of the closing day: Monnehs (masked revellers) filled the streets, boys and girls sprayed water and colour on each other and a number of khells were performed.
"And now the carnival is over Let’s sing our last goodbyes…The carnival is over."

DAVID ALBEQUERQUE