Goa is silent on caste. It's invisible, and not in English

The Print

13-05-2025

Less than an hour south of Dicholi lies Ponda's Keri village, where the Mahar community buried their dead in two communal graves: one for men, and the other for women. Every time a new death occurred, the villagers exhumed the remnants of the previous corpse, and buried the new one. The remnants are believed to be taken away by ghosts.
At the Gade festival, celebrated and widely Instagrammed during Holi, groups of men fall into a 'spiritual trance' and run toward the woods, following the light of the Devchar, a protective spirit. In places like Dicholi, this took a morbid turn, where the Gade dug out human remains – often of women – tied them to a stick and returned to the village for a final dance.
Dadu Mandrekar saw these rituals for what they really were: terrifying and degrading practices that were inextricably linked with caste. The late journalist, writer, and Ambedkarite activist spent years travelling through Goa, often in an autorickshaw, mapping its Dalit vastis and visiting the houses of the state's poorest and most destitute. He documented this parallel geography of the state in Bahishkrut Gomantak, a slim Marathi volume that was first published in 1997. Twenty-seven years later, Untouchable Goa, an English translation by Nikhil Baisane, published by Panther's Paw Publication, was launched here last week.
Silence around caste
The strident, incandescent book maps the contours of a Goa that exists so far away from the dive bars, heritage tours, and laid back beach shacks, so as to be almost invisible. There is little room for the realities Mandrekar recorded, when most of Goa is imagined as a palm-fringed backdrop to Bollywood fantasies. His Goa is of extreme poverty, illiteracy, and inherited humiliation, of communities like the Mahars who bear the weight of caste hierarchies even in death.
The squall that slips off Mandrekar's pages is an excavation of how a society maintains its myths. The silence around caste in Goa – a state that takes great pride in positioning itself as India's most liberal – becomes its own form of oppression. But even here, caste is inescapable. This month, the state government notified The Goa Prisons (First Amendment) Rules, 2025, prohibiting caste-based discrimination in prisons and correctional institutions. The new rule states: 'It shall be strictly ensured that there is no discrimination, classification, or segregation of prisoners on the basis of their caste, and it shall be strictly ensured that there is no discrimination of prisoners in the allotment of any duty or work in prisons on the basis of their caste.' The amendment also calls for a binding effect of the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013.
In such a backdrop, Untouchable Goa remains as relevant as when it was first published. The book launch, which drew a large crowd, was accompanied by a conversation between Baisane, Kaustubh Naik, a doctoral scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, independent researcher Amita Kanekar, and publisher Yogesh Maitreya.
Baisane later told me that a few of the attendees, who didn't understand English, had come for the launch. 'They told me they wanted Dadu's words to reach many more people,' Baisane said. 'I was quite surprised and touched by that. We tend to forget the impact of English.'
Baisane's journey into Mandrekar's world began as an act of faith. A writer from North Maharashtra, based in Pune, he had never been to Goa when Maitreya approached him in January 2024 with the manuscript. Baisane's challenge was to translate Mandrekar's unique voice – a prose that was simultaneously straightforward and layered with bitter irony. This was writing that employed the classical flourishes of dominant Marathi literature while using them to document experiences that literature had studiously ignored. 'He describes the beauty of the river like a mother,' Baisane explained, 'but in the next paragraph, he describes the pain of marginalised people. It has a very hard-hitting effect.'
In the book's introduction, Mandrekar speaks of his disconnection from the Ambedkarite literary movement because of his physical location, leaving you with a picture of a man who was isolated and sad. 'But he is also worried and anxious for the future of his caste fellows. He has a fire in his belly, that is very motivating,' Baisane said. Mandrekar's writing speaks to universal experiences, and the texture of marginalisation that transcends geographical boundaries.
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Goa's Stockholm syndrome
This isn't the first time a translation of Bahishkrut Gomantak has been attempted. Journalist and publisher Frederick Noronha, who knew Mandrekar well, was keen to have the book translated. That project unfortunately never materialised, but Noronha is glad that it has now seen the light of day, even 'as a snapshot of those times, which aren't very remote from today.' Noronha notes that some of these issues aren't even noticed, partly because they're not available in English, which contributes to the broader silence around caste.
'Two issues strike me here,' he said. 'Forces like access to education and heavy out-migration have helped to avoid the focus on caste issues, because a wider section feels they can ascend in life. Besides, in post-1961 Goa, and even pre-1961, the focus has been more on (then) soft-communalism (later harder-communalism) rather than caste.'
'So even while the MGP claimed to speak out for the Bahujan Samaj, it mostly did not include minority community (Catholic) Bahujans under its umbrella, or wasn't very successful in doing so,' Noronha added.
When Goa's literature engages with caste at all, it faces active resistance. 'A literary award to Vishnu Wagh's poetry collection 'Sudirsukt' (Hymns of a Shudra) created a huge uproar and even the most progressive (or so they claimed) of the Konkani writers came out against writing of such divisive literature, because it hurled abuses at the Saraswat community in Goa,' Naik told me.
Goa's overall identity has also created what Naik calls a 'Stockholm syndrome' among the marginalised communities, who often participate enthusiastically in rituals that reinforce their own subordination. Across the state's temples, caste-based labour was codified through the Regulamento das Mazanias, 19th-century Portuguese regulations through which 'the Mahars were expected to beat the drums during temple ceremonies, the devadasi women were expected to sing and dance in front of the palanquins, or the cleaning of the temple was relegated to certain families.' Although, some of these practices have stopped now.
Some temples built on tribal lands allow these communities entry once a year, only to close the next day for purification rituals. As Naik observed, marginalised and Bahujan communities now often embrace these same rituals – a tragic irony that would have troubled Mandrekar deeply.
This institutionalised blindness thrives in conjunction with Goa's tourist-friendly image. The state's liberal credentials become a convenient shorthand that allows people to say that Goa isn't as bad as UP or Bihar. But this deflection obscures the fact that in Goa, caste operates through subtlety. 'The moment you start analysing Goa's landholding, control over temples, cultural dominance, things start becoming clear,' Naik said. 'I mean, the most sought after culinary experience in Goa is the so-called Saraswat thali. That is also caste and one should question how something like the Saraswat thali has come to stand-in for a cuisine of an entire state?'
Similarly, the Kunbi saree, traditional dress of a labouring, bahujan community, is now eagerly commodified into a heritage consumable shorn of the community's historical marginalisation. 'To what extent does the community get to decide how they want to shape the course of their own sartorial history?' Naik asked.
In this landscape, Mandrekar's voice acquires an almost archaeological significance that continues to echo well into the present – demanding recognition, urging us to see what has been rendered invisible. The dead in Goa may not die and neither do the truths they carry.
This article is part of the Goa Life series, which explores the new and the old of Goan culture.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)