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Goa
Carnival
Goa Carnival
Among the various colourful feasts and festivals feasts and festivals that
Goa celebrates -with great eclat, Carnaval and Shigmo are the most
rumbustious, awaited by the population with intense enthusiasm. Unlike
'Shigmo' which is also celebrated in some oilier parts of India, although
under different appellations, 'Carnaval Goa's own, unique, and the Union
Territorys contribution to India's other expressions at untrammelled
revelry.
Although introduced by the Portuguese who ruled this
territory for over 50 years, from 1510 to 1961, the three-day festival
primarily celebrated by Christians, has absorbed Hindu tradition-bound
revelry and western dance forms, and stimulated by the artistry of the Goan
genius turned into a pageantry of singular effervescence.
If
down the centuries Carnaval was enjoyed only by the local population, today
its fame has crossed the frontiers attracting thousands of people from all
over India to whom this type of extravaganza is at once riotous and
different.
The participation of the Goa Government and the
Municipal Councils in it and the post-liberation introduction of the King
Memo and his colourful procession have endowed Carnaval with a new dimenion
and it is bound to attract more people every year to this territory whose
scenic beauty and white-sanded benches have already earned Goa high praise.
It was in the fitness of things that the Goa Government, through its
Department of Tourism, should have given a boost to the celebration of the
three-day Carnival festival as a major tourist attraction. Distinctly Latin
in character, a legacy of Portuguese cultural tradition, the Carnival is not
celebrated elsewhere in hidhi, and it wan in decline even in Goa in the last
years of Portuguese rule. Its revival and celebration with an added zest
was, therefore, on the cards as, after Goa's Liberation, tourism was being
developed as a regular industry. This festival of three days of gay abandon,
riotous revelry and merry-making now attracts to Goa thousands of tourists
from all over India.
The word Carnival (Carnaval in Portuguese)
is supposed to be derived from flu- Latin Carnelevarium or rarnem levarem,
meaning "to take away meat", which actually happens at the
commencement of the 40-day penitential period of fasting in commemoration of
Jesus Christ's fasting in the wilderness, known among the Christians as
Lent, during which abstinence from meat is a rule. The Konknni world
venture, by which it is known among the illiterate masses, comes from the
Portuguese intrude, in turn coming from the Latin Latin Introitum, meaning
entry into the Lenten period.
Celebrated particularly in the
Latin Catholic countries of Southern Europe, it appears to have originated
in Italy as a substitute for the Roman pagan festival known as Saturnalia in
honour of Saturn, the god of Agriculture, observed in the month of December
as a period of unrestrained merry-making, as it signaled the rebirth of
Mother-Nature and the beginning of a New Year. From Italy, in which country
it was celebrated with éclat mainly in Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples
and Turin, it spread out to other Latin countries such as France, Spain and
Portugal and also to Germany and Austria. The Portuguese brought it to Goa
as they also took it to Brazil. Where it is celebrated with undiminished
gusto even to this day, as it is in Argentina and other Latin-American
countries, where it was imported by the Spaniards, while it almost died away
in Europe, except for a few places, like Nice, among others.
Brutal and city in days gone by, in Goa as in Portugal, with real street
battles fought by groups of masked people armed with baskets of rotten eggs
and saw-dust or wheat flour packets known as cartuchos and cocotex and
syringes filled with coloured water, so much so that that there were from
time to time ediets in order to curb its excesses, the Carnival festival
gradually became more moderate, being of late confined to the halls of clubs
and other recreation centres with balls, fancy dress parades and such other
innocent passtimes.
Just as in Europe Carnival played a
significant role in the development of popular theatre and folk songs and
dances, so also in Goa it gave birth to the khell or fell, the typically
Goan ambulatory the arterial performance, satirical in nature, very much in
vogue even some twenty or thirty years ago in our villages, holding to
ridicule the vices, the foibles or the follies of the local grandees, the
Pad Vigar or parish priest, the regedor or village patel or the batkar or
landlord to the amusement of the people. This, in my view, is one more
aspect on which emphasis should be laid in order to develop the creative
power of the common man.
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