'I am Goan [not] Indian': postcolonial ruptures in the South Asian diaspora.

Rajiva, Mythili ; D'Sylva, Andrea

Abstract

Postcolonial scholars have theorized colonization as a complex and contradictory experience of subject formation for the colonized; despite what are often strategic performances of mimicry, the colonized come to know themselves as inferior or as shaped by multiple and mutually competing demands on their identities. However, it is not clear that all colonized groups experience this form of ambivalence or hostility towards former colonizers. This article examines the postcolonial identities of a particular sub-group in the South Asian diaspora: Catholic Goans in Canada. Drawing upon qualitative interviews with thirteen Catholic Goan women in the Greater Toronto Area, we argue that not enough attention has been paid to the multiplicity of identities that emerge out of colonial contexts. For example, some of the participants in this study narrated their Portuguese influenced identities as something to be embraced and even celebrated. More interestingly, several participants demonstrated a stronger connection to the European influences on their identities (English language, Catholicism as the dominant religion and western cultural traditions) than they did towards 'Indian' cultural markers. In fact, the defining of themselves as Goan and not Indian was a noticeable part of some participants' narratives of identity. In this discussion, we explore how the Self/Other distinctions created under both Portuguese and British colonization in the sub-continent remain salient features of postcolonial identities in the South Asian diaspora.

Resume

Les chercheurs postcoloniaux ont theorise la colonisation comme une experience complexe et contradictoire de formation du sujet pour les colonises; malgre ce qui n'est souvent que manifestation strategique de mimetisme, ces derniers en sont venus a se voir comme inferieurs ou comme marques par une identite plurielle faconnee par des exigences multiples et en competition les unes avec les autres. Il n'est cependant pas clair que l'experience de tous les groupes colonises aient experimente cette forme d'ambivalence et d'hostilite envers leurs anciens colonisateurs. Dans cet article, nous etudions les identites postcoloniales d'un sous-groupe particulier de la diaspora sud-asiatique : les Goanais catholiques au Canada. A partir d'entrevues qualitatives menees aupres de treize Goanaises catholiques du grand Toronto, nous demontrons qu'on a pas assez porte d'attention a la multiplicite d'identites qui peut emerger de contextes coloniaux. Par exemple, certaines de nos participantes ont raconte comment elles accueillaient et meme celebraient ce qui en elle relevait de l'influence portugaise. Encore plus interessant, plusieurs d'entre elles ont montre une plus grande affinite avec l'apport europeen (l'anglais, le catholicisme comme religion dominante et des traditions culturelles occidentales) qu'avec les indicateurs culturels <<indiens>>. Actuellement, une partie notable de l'expression de leur identite chez quelques participantes est le fait de se definir comme Goanaises et non comme Indiennes. Dans cette presentation, nous explorons comment les distinctions du Moi/Autre nees sous la double colonisation du sous-continent, la portugaise et la britannique, restent des traits essentiels des identites postcoloniales de la disposa sud-asiatique.

In the whole of India, no people is as denationalised as Goans. A complete lack of national consciousness and the most shameful subjugation to foreign rulers, either Portuguese or British, render the Goan Christian a stranger in his own land. A servile follower of everything foreign to his country, hybrid in manners and habits ... he is considered to be of mixed blood on account of the Portuguese names he has adopted and the western manners he affects.

--Goan Congress Committee, Bombay 1944. Cited in Pramod Kale, 1994. "Goan Intellectuals and Goan Identity: An Unresolved Conflict."

INTRODUCTION

This article theorizes the lingering effects of European colonization on the identities of a subset of the South Asian diaspora: Catholic Goan-Canadians. It draws upon qualitative interviews with thirteen Catholic Goan-Canadian women to examine how a colonized past still informs their current identities in ways that are more complex than many studies of the colonial condition have acknowledged. We locate our discussion in a postcolonial framework of analysis that emphasizes the uneasy and often contradictory aspects of forging a collective national identity for formerly colonized populations. We explore how, for some diasporic Catholic Goans, identity is shaped by a narrative of absencing: the history of Portuguese colonization in Goa, the 1960s 'liberation' of Goa from Portuguese rule by the Indian state, the contemporary hybrid spaces of Catholic and Hindu identity in Goa itself, and even the question of native tongue are all erased in favour of an origin myth of authentic Goan identity as Catholic, Portuguese-influenced and English-speaking. We argue that this narrative of authentic Goan identity illustrates the tensions identified by postcolonial theorists such as Fanon, Memmi and Bhabha, between strategic performances of mimicry on the part of the colonized and the ambivalence that results from these performances. The imposition of colonial culture on natives of a country, which requires the subjugated to imitate this culture for strategic reasons, becomes a cause of deep psychic confusion at both a collective and individual level; according to Memmi (1965, 87), we cannot underestimate the harmful effects of the "echo" that colonialism creates in the colonized, leading to a reluctance to identify solely with either one's own culture or the colonizing culture that has shaped one's country. This ambivalence is further complicated by transnational migration processes: large numbers of diasporic communities in the modern era have settled in former colonial centres or their colonies, such as Britain, the United States, Australia or Canada. These migrants and subsequent generations have to grapple with the remnants of colonial racism in these countries, where they continue to be seen as racially inferior; and are marginalized politically, legally, culturally and socially.

While we concur with much that has been written on these aspects of postcolonial identity, we suggest that not enough recognition has been paid to the heterogeneous nature of colonized groups within a particular nation state. For example, analyses of the South Asian postcolonial condition have often overlooked significant differences within both homeland and diasporic populations in terms of region, religion, and ethnicity, which have variously shaped the postcolonial identities of subgroups such as Catholic Goans. In reality, these internal differences have produced distinct histories of relationships between the colonizers and colonized as well as multiple forms of contemporary self-identity. This study focuses on the specificity of the Catholic Goan identity, which, in contrast to the rest of the sub-continent, is heavily influenced by the experience of being colonized by the Portuguese for 451 years. This particular colonial experience, while subsequently layered by British colonialism, has remained an over-determining feature of Catholic Goan identity, both within the contemporary Indian state, as well as outside it, as evidenced by the strong Catholic, Portuguese-influenced identity still held onto by some diasporic Catholic Goans.

FRAMEWORK OF ANALYSIS

We draw upon a postcolonial framework, which emphasizes the importance of mapping both the suffering and complicity of subjects under colonialism and the psychological effects of this encounter in its aftermath (that is, after the end of official colonialism). As Mohanty points out, colonization results in "multiple intersections of structures of power" that create a spider web of restrictions for the colonized to shepherd their way of life into one that was often unrecognizable from its original form (2004, 56). Postcolonial theory, therefore, commits itself explicitly to a project of psychological and historical recovery; according to Leela Gandhi, "if its scholarly task inheres in the carefully researched retrieval of historical detail, it has an equally compelling political obligation to assist the subjects of postcoloniality to live with the gaps and fissures of their condition, and thereby learn to proceed with self-understanding" (1998, 8).

One important concept in postcolonial theory is that of mimicry, the identification with, and performance of, colonial superiority by the subordinated. The painful and even traumatic disavowal of one's culture through the abandonment of language, religion, and other signifiers, is achieved through the internalization of colonial disgust towards the native Other, a process that Parry insists is far more insidious than "naked repression" (2004, 20). The colonized come to loathe their own culture and dark skin and long to be like those who have subordinated them; as Memmi points out, this means hating the colonizer and yet admiring them passionately (cited in Gandhi 1998, 11). Colonial subjects then set out to become as much like their masters as possible, both in order to reap the rewards that this imitation will garner but, as well, because they have come to believe in their own inferiority. This is a significant aspect of colonized and post-colonial subjectivities; as Gibson puts it, colonial brutality engenders "huge psychological costs" to both the individual and the group (2011, 8). In this reading of colonialism, the epistemic violence of the colonial encounter permanently cripples subjects on a psychological level (Fanon 1967,18).

The literature on colonialism and postcolonial identity is central to understanding the experiences of the Catholic Goan diaspora in Canada. Catholic Goans, who experienced two different colonial regimes in India--the British and Portuguese--had to negotiate a form of colonial subordination that differed significantly from that experienced by other Indians. However, because of their religious diversity, Goans do not fit neatly into a conventional postcolonial understanding of fractured and ambivalent identity. The desire to be like the colonial master has dominated the history of Catholic Goan identity, but this desire has not been accompanied, automatically, by the "intimate enmity" (Nandy cited in Gandhi 1998,13; also see Nandy 1983) that theorists describe as characterizing the colonial and postcolonial relationship between the west and India. For instance, Bhabha's theorizing of mimicry suggests that the colonized use imitation as an act of aggression and even defiance (Bhabha 1994). Yet, for some Catholic Goans in the diaspora, this sense of "menace" in mimicry, is missing (Bhabha, 123). Instead of imitating their former colonial masters for strategic reasons, all the while maintaining what Bhabha calls "a violent discourse of ressentiment" (75), many Catholic Goans have maintained a colonial identity and continue to identify strongly with the parts of their cultural heritage that are most westernized. This seems almost counter-intuitive in a post-colonial era, unless we recognize that Catholic Goans considered themselves a privileged community both during colonialism and after (Kuper 1979; Sant'ana 2008). For those who left Goa after Indian independence and/or the Indian government's 'liberation' of Goa from Portugal in 1961, their sense of selfhood may be rooted in a colonial mythology that positions them as superior to both Hindu Goans and other Indians; this fosters a sense of Goanness as being automatically conflated with Catholicism, despite the fact that in the current Goan state of India, 65% of Goans are Hindu and only 30% are Catholic (Henn 2008, 661).

Furthermore, unlike some Catholic Goans living in Goa who have embraced a syncretic Catholic/Hindu/Indian identity (Henn 2008), many diasporic Catholic Goans continue to practice western cultural norms (albeit with an Indian twist), without any noticeable desire to let go of these norms and claim a post-colonial identity. For example, some of the women interviewed seemed to view their Goanness through what we might call a 'colonial optic' where temporal boundaries between the colonial past and postcolonial present dissolve through participants' use of historically specific markers of inferiority and superiority. This dynamic adds an extra layer to Bhabha's point that colonialism, far from being of the past, is actually part of an "anguished presence" (Bhabha 1994, 68), which collapses the temporal and linear distinctions of past and present through which we make our official histories (Huddart 2006). However, we argue that for some diasporic Catholic Goans, the anguish is not centred around the experience or history of colonization. Instead, they display a form of ambivalence around their Indianness, manifested not only through both racialized and ethnicized markers, but also through an uneasy awareness of a shared heritage with Hindu Goans, before the coming of either the Portuguese or the British. This difficult or "anguished" heritage comes to be disavowed in certain narratives of Catholic Goan identity, through an absencing of both crucial historical events as well as contemporary dynamics in India.

METHODOLOGY

Qualitative research, particularly work influenced by feminist and social justice principles, attempts to conduct research that is meaningful and ethical, yet also recognizes the inherent power imbalance between researcher and participant in any interview process (Anderson and Jack 1991; Fine 1994; Gubrium and Holstein 1998; Sherif 2001). For example, Etter Lewis (1991) describes the interview text as a site of interpretative conflict where, sometimes, the subject's views on what has shaped her life differ from the interviewer's understanding. This tension cannot be easily resolved, either by re-centering the participant as the sole arbiter of her own experience (which assumes that one's self-identity is transparent to oneself), or by situating the researcher as the authoritative voice of 'truth.' Our own position, following Reay (1996), is that productive tensions are created when participants and researchers have different interpretations, because they offer multiple viewpoints. It is important to note that no single interpretation is the final word on a subject; as Reay points out, interpretation is, in some sense, always contingent and incomplete.

Furthermore, it is crucial that researchers acknowledge their own biases and how their interpretations are sometimes shaped by some of the same structuring forces as interview participants. Therefore, both the authors of this article acknowledge our situated-ness as insider researchers to the South Asian diasporic community. At the same time, there are important differences between us that bear mentioning. Rajiva is a second generation South Asian Canadian woman, whose cultural background is South Indian. Her religious background is Hindu and Protestant Christian and, therefore, both regionally as well as religiously, she is an outsider to the Catholic Goan diaspora. D'Sylva is a first generation woman of Catholic Goan ancestry, and is, thus, an insider researcher. The juxtaposition of the two authors in terms of our shared South Asianness as well as our intra-group differences provided a richer, more complicated analysis of the interview material: what might be termed shared differences created a fruitful tension that allowed each author to interrogate underlying assumptions made by both participants and the other researcher around issues of what was 'authentically' Goan, Hindu or Indian. In this way, we disrupted each other's cultural categories, categories that have shaped our own taken-for-granted assumptions regarding who does or not belong to what community for which reasons.

The data for this article were collected by D'Sylva, who interviewed 13 women in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) (the largest Goan community in Canada) in the winter of 2009, to explore the intersection between gender and food and its role in the creation and maintenance of a diasporic identity. Participants were recruited through posters distributed within the community as well as through snowball recruitment. All participants had to be first generation Goan Canadians, 18 years of age or older, having lived in Canada for at least five years. The final sample of 13 women ranged in age from 26-70 years, with nine of them between the ages of 42 and 53. They had been living in Canada for 8 to 42 years; most were under the age of 25 when they came to Canada, though four were in their 30s. Nine of the women were married or living with a male partner, one was widowed, and three were divorced or single. Eight had children still living at home, two had grown children, and three did not have children. Most of the interviews were approximately 60 minutes in length with some running over 90 minutes. Detailed field notes were written after each interview and interviews were transcribed verbatim. Participants were assigned numbers to protect their confidentiality.

Postcolonial identity was not the focus of these interviews, therefore, there were no direct questions that addressed this issue. However, the role of Portuguese colonization in creating a 'different' identity from other Indians was a common theme for many participants. These comments, which raised some fascinating questions about Self/Other relationships within supposedly racially/ethnically homogenous communities, formed the basis for this paper. We also do not focus on the role of foodwork in maintaining diasporic Goan identity (this aspect is the topic of another article published by D'Sylva (see D'Sylva and Beagan 2011). Rather, we draw on the interview data to explore how broader concerns with colonization and contemporary identity differences emerged as 'narrative traces' (Rajiva 2013) in many of the interviews.

Methodologically, we examine how a narrative of absencing is mobilized by participants, in their comments on Catholic Goan identity and history. The focus on narrative requires probing subjects' statements for both conscious and unconscious anxieties and ambivalences around what it means to be Goan and/or Indian. Perhaps more importantly, we attend to what is not being said, what gets left out or glossed over in particular narratives of Goanness. According to Puar (2007, 20), a crucial question raised in postcolonial theory is the question of haunting; what past events and ruptures haunt subjects' accounts of the present or, as Puar puts it, "the primacy of the past and our inheritance of the past: its hauntings, its demands, its present absences and absent presences." In our analysis, we are concerned with theorizing some of these absent presences and present absences, specifically in terms of how Catholic Goan identity in the diaspora is sometimes narrated through a particular version of the past that erases any internal struggles or conflicts with Portuguese colonization in favour of a seamless origin myth.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CANADIAN SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA

South Asians are documented as having first entered Canada in the early 20th century (Singh 1994). Despite being British citizens (from British India) in a British colony (Canada), the early years were marked by discrimination (Buchignani et al. 1985; Indra 1979). Racist ideologies in Canada in the early 1900s disenfranchised South Asians by denying them the vote, barring them from certain professions and preventing them from owning land in Canada (Singh 1994). South Asian migration to Canada was slow and, at times, explicitly curtailed and this only changed in the 1960s, when all explicit reference to race was removed from Canadian immigration policies and a new 'point system' allowed (select) South Asians to enter Canada in large numbers (Ralston 1999). The influx of peoples from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan during this time set the stage for the essentialized term of 'South Asian'. Discrimination was rampant during this influx of South Asians and the derogatory term 'Paki' was often hurled at anyone with brown skin, regardless of specific origin (Rajiva 2006; Stasiulis 1989).

As a sub-group within the larger South Asian diaspora, Goans have been relatively invisible in both the literature and history of immigration. In reality, however, Goans have been migrants for over a century, first migrating outwards in larger numbers as valuable employees for the British Empire in India and East Africa. Today, the Catholic Goan diaspora is found in all Western English-speaking countries, with settlements in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Migration of Goans to Canada has mirrored the migration patterns of other South Asians at similar time periods. In addition, the Goan community in Toronto is a racially marginalized group, often referred to as South Asian, and grouped with other Indians. But despite the fact that the term South Asian is used frequently within Canadian society, it has less currency among those to whom the label applies; many 'South Asians' continue to see themselves as coming from distinct, culturally different countries and/or regions. This is particularly the case with many members of the Catholic Goan community in Canada, who see themselves as different from other Indians because the former are Catholic, English speaking, wear Western dress and eat a diet that includes beef and pork. Thus, the inclusion of Catholic Goans in the larger category of South Asian is a result of the homogenizing force behind dominant Canadian understandings of racialized difference. Perhaps most significantly, the fact that South Asian identity is contested within parts of the Catholic Goan community speaks to a colonial history that is often forgotten or overlooked, one that pre-dates the British in India.

THE ROOTS OF CATHOLIC GOAN IDENTITY

Although standard historical accounts of Indian colonialism identify the British as the primary colonial force shaping the Indian sub-continent's history, Goa, a small area on the west coast of India, was colonized by the Portuguese for 451 years. Portuguese was the lingua franca of the day, with Portuguese laws, schools and--the lasting remnant of colonization to this day--the religion of the colonizers, Roman Catholicism (Desai 2000; Mascarehnas-Keyes 1993). Forced conversion was accompanied by expulsion of Hindus who refused to convert, destruction of Hindu temples and the construction of Catholic Churches (Henn 2008), while allowing a certain 'Indianness' to the practice to prevent the new converts from reverting to their former religion (Borges 2000). Although Portuguese surnames of Goans are due to their religious conversion and not because of intermarriage (Teotonio deSouza, 2000 in quoting T.B. Cunha, p. 488), 'being' Portuguese, that is, speaking the language or following their traditions, was central to being considered part of the "Goan social elite" (Melo Furtado 2000; Rodrigues 2000).

The fostering of internal animosities among different ethnic' or religious groups, through such means as religion, dress or even food, was a common colonial strategy (Avieli 2005; Narayan 1997). Catholic Goans, according to various historians, occupied a privileged place under both Portuguese and later British rule, in comparison with many of their Indian compatriots. The Portuguese colonizers had agricultural income from the land that the Goans farmed and, later, the British had westernized employees on whom they could depend (Kuper 1979, 246). According to some British administrators, the "most trusted member of the district staff was the senior Goan clerk" (Kuper 1979, 246). This type of elevation inevitably led to Catholic Goans thinking of themselves as 'culturally European' although they were grouped with other Asians especially in the African countries of the British and Portuguese Empires. Despite their maintenance of many Elindu traditions such as the caste system and arranged marriages, Catholic Goans downplayed any attempt to group them with Indians, and were often perceived by colonial rulers as 'brown Europeans' (Kuper 1979, 250), part of a group that Memmi (1965, 11) would call "small colonizers," those removed from immediate authority who, nonetheless, defend the colonial system because they benefit from it.

The 1961 liberation of Goa from official Portuguese rule by the post-independence Indian government further divided Goans: many Catholic Goans who strongly identified with Portugal or did not see themselves as being part of an India with a large Hindu majority population, left at this point for Portugal, the Portuguese colonies in Africa or North America (Newman 1984, 433). Finally, in 1987, after being a "separate entity" within the federal system for some twenty years, Goa was finally incorporated as India's 25th state (Rubinoff 1992, 471). The latter official incorporation has created profound changes in the area, one of which is a more shared sense of Goanness across religious identities. According to Newman (1984), Henn (2008) and other researchers, contemporary Goan culture demonstrates what Henn calls a "syncretistic" form of worship, where wayside shrines can be found with both Christian saints and Hindu deities; religious holidays combine various cultural and religious aspects; and events such as "tiatr" (a theatrical performance specific to the region) or the annual "jagar" festival combine elements of Hinduism and Christianity (Henn 2008, 661; also see Kale 1986). In addition to this, many Catholic Goans have gone back to trace their Hindu lineage, and even adopted Sanskrit names (Kale 1986, 2063).

In the face of this hybridization, some diasporic Goans, particularly those who left post 1960s but pre 1987, may be emotionally invested in a narrative of Goa that is less about the present and more about what Dickinson (2012, 2) calls "staging the past," in this case, a particular colonial past which elides both the tensions of Hindu/ Catholic differences as well as the actual presence of Hindu Goans. This "museumizing" (Das Gupta 1997) of Goan identity fosters a fantasmatic understanding of who is and is not part of the 'authentic' Goan community. However, it also complicates taken-for-granted assumptions in some of the postcolonial literature about colonial rule being experienced by subjects as predominantly "brutal" or "ruthless" (Gilroy 2005). Instead, Catholic Goans in the diaspora illustrate quite profoundly how differential positionings within a colonial regime engender multiple relationalities between the colonized and their subjects, which cannot be easily fit into the more conventional framing of "a murderous and decisive struggle between two protagonists" (Parry 2004, 26).

RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

Bhabha argues that the colonial past creates a liminal space that continually disrupts the present; according to him, "this 'past-present' becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia of living" (1994, 10). One of the noticeable aspects of the interviews with Catholic Goan women in the diaspora is this past-present; despite not being a central theme of the interview questions, participants themselves repeatedly gestured towards colonization and its effects. Some of these women had never lived in or visited Goa, yet the legacy of Portuguese colonization was clearly evident. To begin with, there was often an overt sense that being Goan was a fixed identity that did not include Hindu Goans, who were not only left out of the story being told but were explicitly Othered. Additionally, subjects' ambivalences about acknowledging the negative aspects of colonization sometimes played out in a kind of transference, where British and Portuguese colonialism were juxtaposed, with the latter being discursively constructed as more benign. Finally, participants struggled to negotiate what it meant to be Catholic Goan in the context of a diasporic South Asian identity. For several participants, this tension was resolved through their use of a colonial optic, whereby the status that Catholic Goans occupied under both colonizers, as "brown Europeans" (Kuper 1979, 250), seemed to re-emerge as an anchoring aspect of identity, even in post-colonial contemporary diasporic spaces such as Canada.

The Authentic Goan as a Catholic Goan

In a diasporic context, identifying as primarily Catholic was an integral part of some participants' identities: for example, several women mentioned church-going as one of their regular activities. While it is the case that under Portuguese colonialism, Catholicism became a crucial part of identity for some Goans, attending church can also be read as an activity central to maintaining a specific diasporic identity that allows for partial inclusion in the Canadian national imaginary. Thus, the maintenance of a colonial heritage also enables a differential form of belonging within a postcolonial, migrant context. In this way, Catholic Goans can implicitly narrate themselves as being closer to the dominant national identity than non-Christian diasporic South Asians and yet also use this space as a way to reinforce their distinct identities within the diaspora: I was raised Catholic and I still have all the Catholic values ... having done this excursion into the outer world, I realize I like being in their world. So I am not a practicing Catholic but I am a cultural Catholic. [#10] Their [traditions] stem from religion ... many of our traditions like Easter celebrations, feasts where we celebrate with other Goans at big halls ... you have a mass and then a party ... that is what I mean by cultural celebrations. [#12]

The above excerpts point to a slippage between Catholic Goans and Catholic Canadians, where the pronouns used--'their' and 'we'--are interwoven to create a hybrid space between the two groups, one that is narrated as positive. Interestingly, as we will see later on, the same storyline of shared spaced was not used to discuss the 'we' and 'they' of South Asian diasporic identity. Participants, for the most part, did not seem overly enthusiastic about claiming shared connections with either Hindu Goans or diasporic South Asians in general. For instance, according to one participant: I think I feel most Goan when I am with other Indians. When I am with Punjabis and I feel like I have nothing in common ... or a whole bunch of Sikhs or Madrasis or South Indians. That is when I feel most Goan. I keep thinking of the same country and how different we are. [#8]

The above excerpts speak to Bhabha's point about how subjects are formed in the interstices of difference, in excess of the parts of difference that supposedly define them (1994, 2). To renounce the colonial legacy is, in some ways, to renounce one's own history. Portuguese colonization, as such, remains a crucial part of current Goan identity and might be characterized through what Rajiva (2010, 216) calls the "colonial ghost in the room, endlessly whispering." Perhaps not surprisingly, then, some participants seemed reluctant to critique the effects of this particular ghost on their current group identity.

For some diasporic Catholic Goans, their identities are fractured by multiple colonial histories and histories of migration. Bhabha describes this fracturing through the problematic of "partial representation" (1994, 126), where the (formerly) colonized subject's claims to identity through its mimicry of the colonizer also represent a paradoxical longing to be seen as "authentic" (1994, 126). This longing plays out in the ways that some participants seemed to view Catholic Goan identity as almost indebted to colonization. For instance, one participant thought it was a "great thing" that the Portuguese colonized Goa and went on to say: "And it [Portuguese colonization] is so much a part of us and who we are, and our value system. ... I don't think you can really separate it" [#5]. The connection with Catholicism was identified by another participant, seemingly without much rancour: "The Portuguese converted the Hindu people living there [in Goa], And that is how our culture formed, from the Catholic missionary" [#9[. Both these accounts implicitly deny that both during and after colonization, there remained a substantial population of Goan Hindus, clearly not included in the notions of 'us' or 'our' mobilized by the participants. Furthermore, this absencing is not simply part of individual accounts of cultural identity but represents a broader discourse of Goan identity as Catholic; according to Scheckter, there is a popular understanding of Goa as a mainstay of Catholic culture, a construct that "belies the importance of Hinduism ... in the shaping of Goan identity" (1994, 467).

For other participants, the cost that Goans paid for Portuguese colonization was not unpacked; perhaps because without colonization this group of South Asians (Catholic with Portuguese last names and a very different diet from Hindu Goans) would not exist: "... from reading history and from hearing about it, I know it was a problem for my forefathers. But in my lifetime, I did not feel that" [#3]. It is worth noting that this stoicism stands in stark contrast to Parry's characterization of a "yearning" on the part of the formerly colonized "for reinstalling an unrecoverable past" (2004, 29). Instead, this participant individualizes her experience: the painful legacy of colonization is undercut by her common-sense statement about how she herself was not affected by colonization, as if past injustices simply belong to the past and have no connection to her present. Similarly, according to another participant: "... I respect being a Catholic even though knowing what we were before, our forefathers were Hindus and we were converted ... I don't think too much about it" [#11]. These two participants, respectively, acknowledge Portuguese colonialism and the erasing of their Hindu/Indian roots through European colonization. In doing so, they simultaneously disown the colonial past and claim a partial remembering, one that constructs them as Catholic Goans but denies the violence of the colonial project. The complicated and contingent nature of this project of remembering illustrates some of the lived contradictions of Catholic Goan identity. Despite participants' denials about the influence of the past on their lives, their identities appear to be very much part of Bhabha's "past-present" (1994, 10). As diasporic Catholic Goans, they remain unidentifiable as either Indian or European; rather, they exist in a liminal social and temporal space that re-invokes an identity ascribed to them under colonialism, as "assimilados" (Kale 1994, 910).

Portuguese vs. British Rule

While the excerpts in the previous section point to how some subjects attempted an erasure of the past as a strategy for negotiating their present, other participants appeared to deal with their ambivalence towards colonialism by positioning colonizers on a continuum, with the Portuguese on one end and the British on another: "... I think we were better off than most [regarding Portuguese colonization] when you think about it. We got the houses, we got the culture ..." [#6]. From this participant's perspective, the Portuguese colonization of Goa was relatively tame with few, if any, enduring horrors. But this narrative belies some important historical events. The early era of colonization was a brutal and violent one, of forced conversions and expulsions of Hindu Goans (Kale 1994, 909). Moreover, according to Scheckter, Goans fought for freedom, unsuccessfully, over 50 times during Portuguese rule (1996, 84). The above participant, thus, draws on a narrative that absences this violent history, suggesting that for all Goans, colonization was a good thing. Similarly, other participants identified the importance of Goan history to current Goan identity but also "staged the past" (Dickinson 2012, 2) in such a way that certain crucial elements of the story were glossed over, perhaps to avoid confronting the harmful effects of Portuguese colonization.

Parry describes colonial power as drawing on "devious techniques of obligation and persuasion" to constitute "an ambivalently positioned colonial subject" (2004, 14). It is interesting that interview participants were more willing to criticize British colonialism either overtly or implicitly. In part, this may have allowed them to dispel a certain uneasiness around uncritically celebrating a Catholic Goan identity. The British history in India mostly affected Goans through migration. In colonizing the East African territory in the area of what is now Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, the British also employed Goans, which resulted in large Goan communities in this part of Africa. More so than Indian Goans, the African Goan community was heavily influenced by the British, as previous generations had worked directly for them (Kuper 1979). One participant described the British influence in East Africa: "I never even saw the British. But the British influence was already set in your living ... the schools ... English is the core subject.... the style of living was the porridge ..." [#2], This participant pointed to how the British colonizers left their imprint even on those who were not part of the indigenous African populations, suggesting that the British legacy was far less palatable than that of the Portuguese: There was conversion ... people were forced.... Do I resent them [the Portuguese]? No ... I think I resent the British more ... because British became divide and conquer. I blame them for the split [of the subcontinent] ... [what] is going on with India and Pakistan, between the Hindus and the Muslims. Africa, they were part of the same thing--draw a line. It's them and all the Europeans here. It doesn't matter if the family got split up because you happened to be on that side of the line that day. Portugal took us and tried to make us [the Goans] ... Catholic. They educated them. But they didn't divide the country They didn't divide families. They did not draw that line and split families up.... [#6]

In this participant's perception of the two colonizers, the Portuguese were more compassionate rulers, while the British were resented for their abuse of power in recklessly dividing countries and, as a result, families. We suggest that this framing of good' vs. 'bad' colonialism allowed some participants to 'protect' their colonial heritage while still critiquing the broader impact of colonial rule. It might also be interpreted as a way for Catholic Goans to belong to the larger Indian national narrative of anti-colonialism while retaining pride in their Portuguese-influenced identities. However, according to Kale (1986, 2055), the reality is somewhat different since the Portuguese did actually successfully institute a "divide and conquer" policy that he describes as "a prototype model for Apartheid." The above excerpt conveniently scapegoats British imperialism and, in doing so, perhaps enables the participant to hold on to her Portuguese inflected identity, rather than dealing with the discomfort that she might feel about siding with one colonizer over another.

Nonetheless, some participants mentioned the more negative aspects of both British and Portuguese colonization, one of which was a legacy of seeing 'white' as superior: "... you still see it whether you are Goan or Indian ... There is still that deference they pay to white people ... they still look up to them ..." [#6]. The colonial legacy of white superiority clearly had an effect on some Catholic Goans who grew up under colonial rule in multiple places, resonating with Fanon's argument about the internalization of the colonial gaze. According to Fanon, "The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle" (Fanon 1967, 18; also see Gibson 2011). The renouncing of Hindu lineage and the local language of Konkani, and the desire to be as whitened as possible were determining features of Catholic Goan identity during both Portuguese and British rule and, for some diasporic Catholic Goans, remain important identity anchors, even in an ostensibly postcolonial era: ... the Portuguese influence has caused people to think, oh, we are a superior race. And also there was this big thing if you spoke Portuguese in the family, you thought you were upper crust.... And that is why Goans will say oh, you know, we are Portuguese. Because in East Africa, we were the only ones who were allowed to go to the white hospitals. We were not sent to the black hospitals. Because we were Goan and so we were different. The Asians, the Indians were sent to the black hospitals, to the coloured hospital. [#8]

Under both British and Portuguese colonialism, the English language, western dress and Catholicism identified Catholic Goans as different and, therefore, 'better' than 'Indians,' a legacy that still informs contemporary Catholic Goan identity. Although, today, Goa is a state in India, many diasporic Catholic Goans are reluctant to call themselves Indian. The colonial legacy of Us/Them, whether from the Indian subcontinent or East Africa, thus, still endures, playing out in multicultural cities such as Toronto. In this way, as postcolonial theorists often point out, rather than being postcolonial, in the sense of being past the colonial, the identities of diasporic Goans demonstrate the lived realities of the neocolonial, as intra-ethnic differences among South Asians continue to be shaped by the hand of past European imperialism.

Indian or not Indian?

On the face of it, the history of Portuguese and British colonialism might suggest that a postcolonial Goan identity would struggle to negotiate the question of historical complicity and what it signifies in contemporary Indian and South Asian diasporic discourses of national unity. While these discourses are part of a larger national imaginary that seeks to provide a seamless and homogenous identity to a subcontinent that has always been religiously, ethnically and linguistically diverse, the importance and success of Indian independence from the British Empire has never been questioned in these official narratives. But many groups remain outside the sometimes "crippling optimism" (Gandhi 1998, 6) of anti/post-colonial India; the recent and contemporary histories of the Sikh movement, the Hindu/Muslim struggles over Kashmir and the political protests of Dalits are all troubling reminders of the hegemonic quality of the counter-colonial narrative within the contemporary Indian nation-state, a narrative that denies important differences within India's geographic boundaries. Diasporic Catholic Goans, however, remain a different kind of reminder, one that re-invokes the colonial seduction (Gandhi 1998, 22), and its lingering power to shape the identities of both individuals and communities. Unlike other diasporic Christian communities who define themselves as being both Christian and Indian (Raj 2008; Osella and Osella 2008), some diasporic Catholic Goans define themselves against Hindu Goan, Indian or South Asian identity, and continue to identify much more closely with both the Portuguese and the British.

The legacy of institutionalized colonialism/racism, thus, contributes to a diasporic Catholic Goan identity built on the exclusion of South Asian others because these others are perceived as 'lesser' (Mohanty 2004; Narayan 1997). This Othering, what Hall describes as the embedding of "power as a constitutive element in our own identities" (1990, 233), plays out in contemporary Catholic Goan identity in Canada, where some Catholic Goans consider themselves not to be associated with an Indian identity, despite shared roots. According to one participant: ... personally I think it is a more complex relationship between Goans and 'Indian ... I find that a lot of Goans don't want to be identified as Indian ... I think it's a bit of snobbery ... [they] think they are better than Indians, and they want that distinction to be made. Like, 'Please don't call me that.' ... I would say Goans identify themselves through ... the fact that they are not Indian. [#1]

Kale (1986, 2057) argues that one factor emerging out of Portuguese rule for Catholic Goans, was an acceptance of, and submission to, colonialism, which was seen as beneficial, in large part because Catholic Goans contrasted themselves with Hindu Goans and other Indians. According to Kale (ibid.), "the feeling of superiority which the lower middle class (Catholic) Goans used to have towards the Hindu Goans and towards Indians in general was the direct result of this colonial mentality, where sharing of religion and manners (if not the morals) of the rulers conferred a special status on the subject populations." This sense of superiority continues to inform some diasporic Catholic Goans' sense of self despite being in a context far removed from India, where Canadians from the dominant group might see this superiority as negligible. For instance, one woman stressed Goans' common Portuguese heritage: "You are not strictly Indian in that you don't.... The dress is different ... the language is different. But I like the Catholic, Western, European ... Portuguese influence. We don't identify with India ... I identify with Goa" [#5]. This participant focused on the differences between Catholic Goans and Indians and stressed the colonial influence in that difference as a positive aspect of her identity, thus, narrating herself as an "empowered citizen of empire" (Dickinson 2012, 10). Another discusses her childhood and the difference between Goans and Indians: Growing up ... you are Goan or you are Indian ... I don't remember having birthday parties with the Indian children in my class ... we were neighbours and we went to school together.... But I don't ever remember having Indian friends. [#6]

It is important to point out that, in both excerpts, 'Goan' is used as shorthand for Catholic Goan, once again eliding both the historical and contemporary realities of a Hindu Goan population. Interestingly, it also elides the continued shared heritage of Hindu and Catholic Goans: according to Axelrod and Fuerch (1998), under Portuguese rule, the privileged class of Catholic Goans was drawn from the highest caste members under Hinduism and this continues to be the case even in contemporary Goa, where highly statused Catholic Goans trace their roots back to either Brahmin or Kshatriya ruling families (450-452). None of this was mentioned by the participants in their discussions of the snobbery or differences between Indians (read Hindu) and Goans (read Catholic Goans), but its reality remains an absent presence haunting the seemingly coherent narrative of Catholic Goan identity.

These forms of Othering, which are specific to the history and politics of the subcontinent, are certainly not exclusive to tensions between Catholic Goans and Hindu Indians; they should also be read as a direct legacy of colonization. According to Nandy, after Independence, "the exposed sections of Indian society have been left to themselves to work through their fears of liminality and rootlessness ... concerned with the differences between the Indian and the non-Indian and the 'us' and the 'they' and forced them to fight a running battle with their feelings of self-hatred and powerlessness" (1983, 77). However, in addition to this binary construction of east/west, Indian/non-Indian, many diasporic Catholic Goans must negotiate a sense of ambivalence towards their own Indianness precisely because they themselves claim to be less Indian than Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs and more Portuguese or Western. Unlike diasporic Catholic Malayalees, for example, who identify as both Christian and Indian (Osella and Osella 2008), diasporic Catholic Goans sometimes experience a profound ambivalence towards being Indian. To be of India and yet not Indian in one's own narrative of self requires a psychic dance that is not easily performed and certainly not without its contradictions, both within individual psyches as well as in the larger group identity of diasporic Catholic Goans.

Nevertheless, not all the participants drew upon "a colonial mode of thought" (Dickinson 2012, 1) to explain their relationship to India or Indian identity. There were some women who called themselves Indian to identify which part of the world they came from, for those who might not know where Goa is located. For others, it was more a recognition that because they 'look Indian' they might as well identify with it. One woman had this to say: My face is not a Portuguese face ... [I have] a very English name, and a Portuguese last name. And nobody who met me ever thought I was white. So what am I doing with a white name? And my face proclaimed my race and my identity. So you might as well embrace that [her emphasis] culture. So that is where the Indian-ness came out very strongly. [#10]

In a similar acknowledgement, a participant pointed out that, "I am more comfortable with my identity. And I will sit and argue with any one of them if they tell me they are not Indian" [#6], Another participant said, "We were Indians before we were converted." At the same time, she also acknowledged that her children, born and raised in Canada, would "say they are Canadians" because this is the only place they've known ... But if you dig any deeper, they would say they are Goans. They will not say they are Indians at this point because they have no connection to being Indian as such. [#3]

Subjects draw on who they are by aligning with those like them, but also by clearly stating who they are not. This was very noticeable when one participant said she does identify as Indian but quickly added that she is Catholic. When asked why, she responded in the following manner: that is sort of my way of being on the defensive. Because I want people to know I am Catholic ... I need to educate them that there are populations of Indians who aren't Punjabi or Gujarati or whatever. I'm Catholic and this is where I am coming from. So there is sort of that need to get that in there, to make sure that they know. [#1]

But just what is it that they (presumably white, Christian Canadians) need to know? We would suggest that in the above excerpt, a very partial history is being claimed. That is, the participant wants people to know that she is Catholic and that there exist Catholic and Christian communities in India because of various colonial forces. However, she is less invested in ensuring that people know that before European colonialism, people were Hindu or Muslim, and that conversion was part of a larger conquest that created vast economic, political and social inequalities. This is not the story that the participant wants to tell about the roots of her identity. Instead, her emphasis on the former locates her in what Gilroy calls "a sanitized history of the imperial project" (2005, 48), one which also allows her to relate to the dominant racialized and religious population in Canada. Despite her location in the Canadian category of South Asian, she appears concerned with securing a form of belonging that, by virtue of their religious and cultural differences, fellow Hindu, Muslim or Sikh South Asians cannot achieve. In a similar vein, according to another participant, "I feel really sad about, a little bit guilty ... I don't want to be identified as a Pakistani because that means they immediately think Muslim [#5]. In a western context that, in recent times, is overtly Islamaphobic, this participant is painfully honest about the reasons for her ambivalence around identifying as Pakistani rather than Goan; she has internalized both colonial and contemporary views on Islam and evinces shame at multiple levels: shame at being Pakistani and the inference that people might make (that she is Muslim), and shame that she feels ashamed of this in the first place.

DISCUSSION

The long term effects of colonialism become evident when we examine how contemporary Catholic Goans in the diaspora sometimes display a profound ambivalence, not toward their colonizers, but towards 'fellow' Indians, those with whom they now share a common geographical and/or diasporic link. The fact that colonization was responsible for their Catholic Goan identity was not disputed or challenged by several participants, it was accepted as part of life: in this storyline, Goans cannot go back to a pre-Portuguese Goa that does not exist--to quote Hall, "history is irreversible" (1990, 231). In moving forward, some of these women spoke of the benefits of colonization and gave examples of their religion and the Western influences, and did not focus on the negative aspects of colonization.

However, as one legacy of colonization, tensions between Catholic Goans and Indians continue to exist and were an unintended topic of discussion during some of the interviews. When this differentiation between Indian and Catholic Goans occurs, Catholic Goan identity is essentialized and constructed as not Indian. For example, one participant described the present state of Goa in disparaging terms seemingly because there are too many Hindus there now: "And now it [Goa] has been taken over by the Hindus. So that kind of bugs me too; what do you say because I don't even live there" [#9], Once again, this narrative elides the historical and contemporary realities of Goa. In the above excerpt, Hindu Goans are constituted as foreigners, as if the authentic Goa is one that does not include Hindus.

Although Goa shares the same land mass and other aspects of Indian life such as laws and systems of ruling, some diasporic Catholic Goans see themselves as set apart, through what Hall (1990, 227) describes as the "doubleness of similarity and difference," a direct result of colonial influence which had the "power to make us see and experience ourselves as Other" (225). As such, in a contemporary diasporic context, many of the Goan women interviewed did not see themselves as Indians, despite obvious contradictions in their identities. Notwithstanding the end of colonialism and the creation of modern nation states, these women were shaped by an enduring and divisive legacy of colonization: the differentiation of Us/Them. Portuguese and, indirectly, British colonization served to divide people, and these divisions are still in place today among many Catholic Goans in the GTA.

Using John Armstrong's term of "border-guards," Yuval-Davis (1993, 627) describes how groups include and exclude members using particular cultural values. For Portuguese colonizers of Goa, one use of a "border-guard" was the conversion of some Goans to Catholicism. Despite their religion being a direct result of colonization, many of the Goan women interviewed still practiced Catholicism, although there were those who spoke of it in the terms of being a 'ritual' or 'cultural' practice. Still, for many Catholic Goans, taking on and maintaining the religion of the colonizer, continues to be what Gandhi (1998, 15-16) terms a "cultural priority."

For the Goan women interviewed, their passage to Canada was often a culmination of living in countries that had undergone colonization, such as India and countries in East Africa. Postcolonial literature often looks at populations who have thrown off the yoke of colonization and reclaimed their country. Such was not the case for Catholic Goans, since there was no going back to a land before Portuguese colonization. Goans have been affected by both Portuguese and British colonization, although the former had a much greater impact. Moreover, Catholic Goans remain distinct from other colonized groups because many of them embrace their colonial past. This valorizing of past subordination jars with a conventional understanding of colonization and its after effects, which Bhabha (1994, 9) describes eloquently as shaping "the complicated histories of subcontinental cultures caught in that deadly embrace of imperial power and domination that always produces an uncomfortable residue of enmity and amity." Instead, some participants seemed to celebrate the effects of Portuguese colonization on their community and their own identities. Several of them were reluctant to question their religion, their Portuguese surnames, or their Westernized culture, accepting it as part of who they were and as, perhaps more importantly, marking the boundaries of who they were not. This does not mean that these women's lives were devoid of the contradictions and tensions that theorists have identified as being part of postcolonial identity work. Yet, their acceptance of a colonized past challenges canonical understandings of ambivalence, hostility and self-hatred in postcolonial theorizing. The interviews that were conducted with members of this particular community, thus, draw our attention to the complexity of diasporic Catholic Goan identity vis a vis contemporary 'Indian identity, a complexity that has not been widely acknowledged or theorized in either postcolonial theory or in more empirical research on the South Asian diaspora.

CONCLUSION

This paper was an exploratory study of diasporic Catholic Goan identity and its distinctiveness in relation to the larger South Asian diaspora. Using excerpts from qualitative interviews done with thirteen Catholic Goan-Canadian women in the Greater Toronto Area, we argued that the experiences of diasporic Catholic Goans, to date, have been largely ignored in either theoretical or empirical work on postcolonial identities. In order to frame some of the more contradictory aspects of diasporic Catholic Goan/South Asian identities, we drew upon a postcolonial framework that emphasizes haunting, ambivalence and mimicry in subjects' narratives of identity. Postcolonial theory examines the fissures and paradoxes of cultural identity for the formerly colonized after the official end of European colonialism. Generally, the relationship between the colonizer and the formerly colonized is characterized by fear, anger, desire and confusion; particularly for the latter, for whom the ability to 'know themselves' as a culture or people becomes clouded by the long-term effects of psychic violence. The colonized have been seen, and come to see themselves, as permanently inferior in relation to the colonizers. While this dynamic is also present for members of the Catholic Goan diaspora, we argue that it plays out differently in terms of shaping their identities as Catholic, western peoples, particularly in relation to 'Indians,' from whom they often distinguish themselves.

We began our discussion by examining the history of Catholic Goans as a doubly colonized population. The Portuguese-inflected identity claimed by many diasporic Catholic Goans is a history that, again, is generally elided in the dominant postcolonial narrative of British imperialism and its long-term effects on the subcontinent. We moved on to examine how interview participants' off-hand, spontaneous comments narrated Portuguese colonialism largely as a good thing; furthermore, we analyzed the ambivalence behind participants' constructions of Us/Them in relation to other South Asians, whom many of the participants lumped together as 'Indian.'

Our overarching concern was to complicate understandings of the postcolonial condition, by exploring how identity in the South Asian diaspora is not always necessarily infused with obvious regret, hostility or confusion regarding colonization, as has been theorized in much of the literature. While they may still be markers of contention, traces of the colonial experience may actually be celebrated as a source of pride and distinction for certain minority communities within the South Asian diaspora. For many of the Catholic Goan-Canadian women who were interviewed, Portuguese colonization seemed to have engendered a superior sense of self; they saw themselves very much as Goans, not Indians, thereby unconsciously conforming to roles of Self/Other as enforced by their colonizers. It is precisely this acquiescence to colonization and the acceptance of this history without much bitterness on the part of some of its members, which renders the diasporic Catholic Goan community a unique and unusual site of identity work within the larger confines of the postcolonial condition.

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MYTHILI RAJIVA is Associate Professor in the Institute of Women's Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on girlhood, the Canadian South Asian diaspora, racialized identities and migration, and has appeared in such journals as Women's Studies International Forum, Girlhood Studies, Feminist Media Studies and The Canadian Review of Sociology. She is also co-editor of Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives on a Canadian Murder (CSP, 2010).

ANDREA D'SYLVA is a Centre Coordinator at Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS. This paper is based on the research she did for her Master of Arts degree in Women and Gender Studies. Born in Pakistan of Goan ancestry, and now a Canadian citizen, lives the legacy of colonization and the challenge of finding one's true identity.