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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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