Public monuments, palliative solutions? Political geographies of memory in Goa, India

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines some of the compromises that emerge in the process of converting colonial-era material culture into ‘heritage’ claiming to foreground a critical postcolonial consciousness. Prompted by recent controversies about statuary celebrating figures who engaged in colonial exploitation and slavery, I look at how frictions inherited from the colonial period are projected onto colonialism’s physical remains. This article, however, enquires into ways in which disputes over the proper function of postcolonial heritage projects may be framed not in a militant, but in a conciliatory register, that aims to accommodate diverse representational imperatives, instead of elevating one as supreme. In postcolonial settings such as the one discussed, these imperatives awkwardly include the tourism industry's promotion of ‘colonial nostalgia’ via the restoration of ‘colonial ambiences’. Focusing on a Portuguese-era fort that served as a prison for Goa’s 'freedom-fighters', I investigate the unexplained, and subsequently contentious, display of pictures authored by the nationally-renowned artist Mario Miranda in one section of the fort. The article then recounts the contours of a public challenge to this exhibition’s legitimacy, and examines the introduction in an adjacent space at the fort of a Freedom Fighters’ Gallery. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, I analyse tensions within and between each of these exhibitions, connecting them to deeper fissures in colonial experience and postcolonial memory. I argue that these fissures are best understood in their relationship to recriminations both about colonial experience and about inequalities traceable to its ‘aftermaths’, which are now consolidated in uneven political geographies.