Life Support for the Old GMC

It was not so long ago, but few people like to remember the magnificent Old Goa Medical College building on the Mandovi riverfront was given to Delhi-based realtors in 2007 to remake into “an upscale shopping mall.” This was done at the behest and with the blessings of Manohar Parrikar, the late chief minister and longstanding MLA of Panjim, who had revamped the heritage precinct to host the International Film Festival of India three years earlier, but now insisted the sprawling 19th-century premises would be best used for peddling luxury goods to tourists. And that is precisely what would have happened except for an unlikely activist intervention in the form of Aparanta, an art exhibition curated by Ranjit Hoskote and mounted by a handful of partners (including me) led by GTDC managing director Sanjit Rodrigues.

Today it is taken for granted that Panjim is brilliantly suited for large-scale cultural events, with people from all over the country flying in to host their jamborees. But that was not the case in 2007, when the exact opposite was true: even the best Goa-based writers and artists were compelled to go elsewhere to showcase their work because conventional wisdom held that India’s smallest state possessed no audience that mattered. For just one example, I will never forget the dismissive, derogatory comments of Fundação Oriente’s representative of the time when asked for his support: “there’s no point – if you want to do anything that matters take it to Mumbai or Delhi.” Those kinds of belittling comments fired lasting anger, and fuelled our collective determination to make Aparanta the blueprint for an alternative future. 

Hoskote laid it out precisely in his magisterial curatorial essay Mapping the Invisible River: Contemporary Art in Goa, itself an important milestone in the making of our contemporary cultural trajectory: “Aparanta intervenes in an existing context; at the same time, it gestures towards the new contexts that it can help frame around the art-works that form its content. As a curator, I have always found exhibitions to be most productive when they deal with the problems that beset an art-making ethos, not when they celebrate what are taken to be the triumphs of that ethos. A problem, attentively handled, can be more rewarding than a triumph, complacently assumed [and] Aparanta is intended to make a major statement: that Goa, far from being a cultural backwater remote from the centres of Bombay, Delhi and Bangalore, is a seed-bed of artistic excellence.”

Part of the problem was hidden history: “Goan art has long been an invisible river, one that has fed into the wider flow of Indian art but has not always been recognised as so doing. This, despite the presence of such master spirits of Goan origin – active throughout the colonial, postcolonial and globalisation periods – as A X Trindade, Angelo da Fonseca, F N Souza, V S Gaitonde and Laxman Pai. This, also, despite the presence on the contemporary Indian gallery circuit, of consummately accomplished artists like Antonio e Costa, Querozito De Souza, Theodore Mariano Mesquita and Viraj Naik. The glossy stereotype is a more effective blinder than the heated needle of the mediaeval executioner: the associations of sun, sand, sex and carnival are so pervasive that even the better-informed denizens of the Indian art world seem unaware of the vibrancy of the art scene in Goa.”

But there were also fundamental misunderstandings to be addressed: “Any sensitive viewer who spends a few days in Goa, visiting studios and galleries (they are often the same space, since the absence of a well-anchored gallery practice obliges artists to be their own agents, entrepreneurially producing and distributing at the same time), will find that Goa has brilliant, meteorically brilliant artists. But the lack of a context has left them afloat in a void of discussion. Geographical contiguity does not mean that Goa and mainland India share the same universe of meaning: Goa’s special historic evolution, with its Lusitanian route to the Enlightenment and print modernity, its Iberian emphasis on a vibrant public sphere, its pride in its ancient internationalism avant la lettre, sets it at a tangent to the self-image of an India that has been formed with the experience of British colonialism as its basis. The relationship between Goa’s artists and mainland India has, not surprisingly, been ambiguous and erratic, even unstable.”

As though this vital context were not pressing enough, Hoskote also pointed out that “one of the reasons for our urgency was the threat of re-purposing that was already hanging over the exquisite building in which the exhibition unfolds, when our discussions began, at the end of February 2007. In the seven weeks that it has taken us to translate ‘Aparanta’ from drawing board into physical existence, the Old GMC Building has been handed over to a New Delhi-based promoter on a 30-year lease, to be converted into a mall. Nothing could be further from the original genius of this site: the grandeur of the Escola Medica Cirurgica de Goa and its belle epoque atmosphere ought to have been secured for a centre for the arts; instead, it will now disappear beneath the glitz of swift-moving luxury goods.”

Rather amazingly – and to some extent, I can still hardly believe it – the mall never happened. Unprecedented numbers of Goans showed up to wander the Old GMC to experience their own art history encompassed on exhibition for the first time: masters of the past like Fonseca, Gaitonde, Souza and Pai plus nineteen contemporary exemplars, as well as Dayanita Singh of New Delhi and Saligao – who is in my opinion India’s greatest living artist – and the Bombay-based Goa Art College graduates, Baiju Parthan and Vidya Kamat. The effect was both exquisite and highly impactful. There were many rave reviews, and India Today’s Kalidas Swaminathan called it “a cumulative voice and a cause to claim national attention”. That is when public opinion quickly shifted against Parrikar’s plans, and finally it was the doctors of the state – ex-GMC students all – who protested to ensure their old alma mater would never become a shopping complex. 

Looking back across 17 years, that moment of triumph appears distinctly bittersweet. There was so much momentum and promise after Aparanta, with all the ingredients and individuals in place to change the paradigm as intended, but every bit of that hopeful energy was squandered thereafter, and the situation reverted to almost exactly what Hoskote described nearly two decades ago. We do have tiny pockets of excellence created by private efforts: Sunaparanta in Altinho, Fundação Oriente’s galleries in Fontainhas, MoCA in Old Goa. But the failure of the state has been abject and absolute, an undeniable disgrace that should make us all hang our heads in shame. We have the greatest legacies but no museum worth its name, and no public collection to honour our own masters. What once belonged to Kala Academy and Institute Menezes Braganza has disappeared. Huge sums were expended to restore the Adil Shah palace to house contemporary art, but that peerless building is crumbling to dust once again due to criminal misuse and neglect. We can clearly observe other states like Tamil Nadu building world-class arts infrastructure under budget in record time, but it is only Goa splurging millions of dollars to destroy its own cultural jewels like Kala Academy. 

Such painful baggage is why I enjoyed the recent Goa Open Arts festival so much, with an overwhelming sense of relief for its sensitive and sensible use of the Old GMC. We have become accustomed to mountains of cash being splashed out on that marvellous heritage complex for various cultural extravaganzas, with zero lasting benefits for city or citizens, but here was an outstanding reminder that much better results can be achieved by simply allowing the structure to breathe the way it was originally intended. There was little waste, and no sense of oppression from the totally inappropriate, with only the beautiful bones of this very lovely centuries-old architecture come alive with consistently relevant and meaningful art and activities. That is what should be happening every day in our city and state spilling over with arts and culture and spectacular venues both old and new, but the sad truth is it almost never does. For their spirited reminder of what could still be our future if enough people come together to make it happen, my salute to Diptej Vernekar, Gurpreet Sidhu, Sitara and Gopika Chowfla, and Prashant Panjiar.