A Marathi andolan was underway in Panaji on 31 August. Flag-bearing supporters of the Marathi Rajbhasha Nirdhar Samiti that seeks equal official language status for Marathi alongside Konkani in Goa, attempted to march toward the Goa Legislative Assembly in Porvorim. They blocked the old Mandovi Bridge, an important arterial road connecting the capital with north Goa. Milling among the crowd were a couple of young boys, who were questioned by Prudent Media, a Goan news outfit. The reporter asked the youngsters why they were protesting along with “senior citizens” and what they hoped to achieve.
They had their talking points ready. One of the boys said they were at the protest to show their love for Marathi. They spoke about “Bharat” and “ekta” (unity), bringing up the Portuguese, and attempted to hint that Konkani was a colonial imposition. When asked why they didn’t want to learn Hindi, considering it was the official language of Indian union, the boys brought the conversation back to Marathi.
This entire conversation unfolded in Konkani.
The reel has since been doing the rounds of social media and has almost a thousand comments. Some ask if they got the tea and samosas they came for; others ask if protesters received the Rs 500 they were no doubt promised for their participation. Most people can’t stop laughing at the irony of demanding official status for Marathi in fluent Konkani.
The Marathi-Konkani question
The demand to grant official status for Marathi has opened a new front in the coastal state’s language politics, reawakening old anxieties that culminated in the Goa Opinion Poll in 1967, followed by the Goa, Daman and Diu Official Language Act, 1987. According to the Act, Konkani in the Devanagari script is the sole official language of Goa, but the same law explicitly allows Marathi to be used “for all or any of the official purposes” in the state.
It stops one step short of according full status to Marathi, but in practice, it means that the state government “maintains a policy of responding in Marathi to any official correspondence it receives in Marathi”.
That provision was likely meant to hold a fragile settlement together. But the ambiguity has allowed the argument to be reopened every few years.
The agitation is being spearheaded by Subhash Velingkar, a stalwart of the old RSS guard in Goa, and another fluent Konkani speaker. For four decades, the ace organiser built Goa’s RSS shakhas and mentored a generation of politicians, including former chief minister Manohar Parrikar, before the two famously fell out.
Over the past year, Velingkar has been whipping up support for the Marathi cause, beginning with small meetings at the taluka level in places like Ponda and Dicholim, traditional Marathi bastions.
“For years, the Goan government has done injustice to Marathi and to people who speak Marathi,” said Velingkar at the rallies, demanding that the government announce it as a co-official language. “It will respect the indigenous culture of the Goan people.”
In an election year, Velingkar has made it clear that the Marathi vote bank will consolidate around this issue and that the “BJP will have to face the consequences.”
Before this, Velingkar’s only involvement with language politics had been through the Bharatiya Bhasha Suraksha Manch, which aimed to defend both Konkani and Marathi against the inevitable march of English in 2011. The organisation had opposed the Congress government’s policy of providing grants to primary-level English schools – an issue that Parrikar and the BJP rallied against. However, when Parrikar came to power the following year, in an alliance between the BJP and the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP), they continued the grants.
Velingkar’s opposition led to his departure from the RSS, along with 400 other volunteers.
Since then, Velingkar has gone on to launch Goa Suraksha Manch, a political party, without much success. He is now better known for stirring up communal controversies, like suggesting that Goa’s revered St Francis Xavier should be stripped of the honorific “Goencho Saib” because he was instrumental in aiding Portuguese colonisation, and that his relics at the Basilica of Bom Jesus be put through a DNA test.
Most current commentary about Velingkar appears to treat him as an organiser without an organisation, eking out a grievance for want of anything better to do. But these grievances have had a rooted resonance throughout Goa’s history. One of the members of the Bharatiya Bhasha Suraksha Manch’s core committee is Uday Bhembre, the octogenarian advocate, politician, writer, and Konkani language activist. Bhembre was one of the leaders of the agitation of the Official Language Act, a law that Velingkar now wants amended.
Bhembre situates these demands in a two-pronged movement: Maharashtrawad and Marathiwad. The first is the belief that Goa is a part of Maharashtra historically, culturally, and linguistically. It began as a resolution passed at literary conferences as far back as 1940, and for a large part of the century, remained an idea among writers.
Things changed with the Liberation of Goa in December 1961, when the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party won Goa’s first election on the central plank that it should be merged with the larger state. The Opinion Poll was eventually held on 16 January 1967, widely known as Asmitai Dis (Identity Day), with only two options on the ballot: Merger with Maharashtra, or continuation as a Union Territory. Fifty-four per cent of the voters refused the merger.
“Maharashtrawad ended there,” Bhembre told me in an interview. But Marathiwad, or organisation around the language, survived.
“A section of the Hindu community continued the movement to grant Marathi official language status, especially in the 1980s, when discussions about language, statehood, and the eighth schedule were at their peak.” By his account, the movement has survived in fits and starts over the last 40 years, but just doesn’t have the arithmetic to back it up. In the 2011 Census, Bhembre said, more than 9.6 lakh people in Goa, or about 70%, declared Konkani as their mother tongue, as opposed to 1.6 lakh Marathi speakers.
“We use Marathi for bhajans, kirtan, literature, and journalism,” Bhembre said. “But that cannot be the criterion for declaring it a Rajbhasha. We have many more users of English – in fact, it is the language of industry and the administration.”
Konkani, he said, is the people’s language and is inherited by babies from their mothers – while Marathi is acquired in primary schools.
Then there is the paperwork. Bhembre wonders if those asking for co-official status for Marathi realise that every file, note, and circular would have to be maintained in both languages. This also means that every employee would have to be proficient in both languages.
“According to people,” said Bhembre confidently, “this issue does not matter at all.”
But it wouldn’t be an issue if it did not matter at all. If Marathi is acquired in primary classrooms, whose children are attending those schools?
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A holdover of Saraswat power
Kaustubh Naik, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, researching the histories of the Portuguese Empire in South Asia, said that Marathi has also been the language of upward mobility for generations of Bahujan Goans, including those from Bhandari, Gomantak Maratha, Gauda and Kunbi samaj.
Naik posited that under the Portuguese, Saraswat Brahmin elites held important positions, while the Bahujan peasantry worked the land owned by upper-caste bhatkars. One of the reasons Konkani was presented as a distinct identity was to preserve the Goan Saraswat Brahmin caste status. After Liberation, the MGP paired land-to-the-tiller reform with Marathi and was modelled on Maharashtra’s anti-caste reform movements, such as the Satyashodhak Samaj.
Naik pointed out that even though today’s Bahujan youth appears to be moving away from Marathi – thanks to Konkani organisations’ equating of the language with Goan identity – Marathi is an unusually accommodating cause. It can be attached to the broader idea of Hindu culture under threat as well as anti-colonial work.
“Konkani is one of the holdovers of Saraswat power,” he told me. Naik believes that rallying behind the language was perhaps their only hope to reinvent themselves in post-Independent India, where they could lay a claim on language and construct a unique identity in order to secure a state, eliminate any reorganisation of the state borders, and preserve their Colonial-era power and privileges. “Still, there is an active revulsion to questioning hierarchies within the Konkani fold. For instance, there are still no translations of BR Ambedkar into Konkani. Marathi being around as a ‘threat’ helps Konkani.”
The heaviest loss in the language debate is borne by Romi Konkani, used primarily by Goa’s Catholic community. Written in the Roman script, the language has an unbroken print tradition that dates back to the 16th century, which is alive today in Goa’s tiatr houses and the Church’s liturgical books. Yet, it has no place in the Official Language Act.
The Catholic community was on the frontlines of the Konkani Porjecho Avaz agitation of 1985-86, which killed seven people. But when the act was passed in February 1987, it only recognised Devanagari Konkani. The standard reply, Naik said, from the Devanagari establishment is that the script is not language, and that the two are the same tongue.
In a Substack post on the issue, Naik wrote that beyond “identitarian posturing”, any amendment to the Goa, Daman and Diu Official Language Act, 1987, should take rights into account, and grant co-official status to Devanagari Konkani, Romi Konkani, and Marathi.
“This tripartite formula remains the missing piece in Goa’s language puzzle,” Naik wrote, though it’s not an unknown truth.
“Romi Konkani advocates have demanded formal recognition for decades. However, an alliance between the Marathi and Romi Konkani camps remains elusive. The broader Hindu nationalist climate of the Indian state, the Brahminical leadership of the dominant Konkani movement, and a Marathi leadership increasingly aligned with Hindutva politics together render such cross-community coalitions nearly impossible.”
Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena, itching to gain a foothold in Goa, has extended the movement its support. In Mumbai, the same party has spent years telling working-class migrants that they should learn Marathi if they want to work in the state. But in Goa, it is asking citizens to consider an expansive definition of what an official language should be.
For now, though, there is a temporary reprieve. Maybe the movement will be back after this slackening, but at least Chief Minister Pramod Sawant has said that he will consider the andolan’s demands. In an election year, it’s the safest thing he can do.
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 Ratan Priya)