Goa Carnivals
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.
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.
