Goanet Digest, Vol 21, Issue 318

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Today's Topics:

   1. Read: "The Money Question RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh]
      Never Had to Answer: An Ex Insider?s View" (Vivek Pinto)
   2. Postcards from Zanzibar (O Heraldo, 27/6/26) (V M)


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Message: 1
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2026 17:49:02 +0900
From: Vivek Pinto <[email protected]>
To: Goanet <[email protected]>
Subject: [Goanet] Read: "The Money Question RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak
	Sangh] Never Had to Answer: An Ex Insider?s View"
Message-ID:
	<CAH3OY9wuBvdu4kfJYROi9nUwX3vVGUCTjVtEKtzBy5ikhPU1jQ-JsoAwUIsXosN+BqQ9rBEUg@public.gmane.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

By: Partha Banerjee  [Partha Banerjee spent nearly twenty years in the RSS,
ABVP, and BJP before leaving the movement. His memoir *In the Belly of the
Beast* (1998) and his later work* Gandhi?s Killers India?s Rulers* (2020)
reflect on those experiences and on questions of democracy, media and
political accountability in contemporary India.]
Published in:* The Wire*
Date: June 27, 2026
Source:
https://thewire.in/politics/the-money-question-rss-never-had-to-answer-an-ex-insiders-view
*Note: *Please access the source to read the entire article
"Priyank Kharge?s remarks have raised important ? and ignored ? questions
about transparency, accountability and trust in a democracy.

Some questions take a lifetime to ask. Others take a century.

The *remarks by Karnataka minister Priyank Kharge*
<https://thewire.in/government/priyank-kharge-rss-mohan-bhagwat-letter-sources-of-income>
 questioning why the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) should not be
subject to registration and public accountability, like countless other
organisations, have triggered yet another political controversy. Supporters
of the RSS have dismissed the suggestion as politically motivated. Critics
have welcomed it as an overdue challenge to one of India?s most influential
institutions"


------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2026 14:06:32 +0530
From: V M <[email protected]>
To: V M <[email protected]>
Subject: [Goanet] Postcards from Zanzibar (O Heraldo, 27/6/26)
Message-ID:
	<CAN1wPW5QPTdARQJa8XuP9PfpV_zrMgLXKjxgr4b7021sST6eBw-JsoAwUIsXosN+BqQ9rBEUg@public.gmane.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

https://www.heraldgoa.in/cafe/postcards-from-zanzibar/479818/

Goa?s diaspora is one of the great wonders of the modern world, as
generations of women and men from this tiny slice of the ancient Konkan
coastline adapted fast and seized opportunities even faster, so the widely
scattered global Goans keep supplying an unexpected force to reckon with in
many different countries.

These extraordinary annals are ongoing, and often complicated. Recently,
for example, we saw European Council president Ant?nio Costa ? former PM of
Portugal who simultaneously holds Overseas Citizenship of India ? at the
forefront of international peace efforts with regards to Ukraine, but also
some indecent hawkish sniping between Claire Coutinho and Suella Fernandes
Braverman on the UK right wing, where they are two of three Goan women in
Parliament.

So far, to her credit, Coutinho is formidable in the British mainstream
without resorting to dog-whistle racism and outright xenophobia like many
of her Conservative colleagues, but Braverman has plunged into the
extremist fringe with alacrity. Now this grand-daughter of Assagao ? where
her father still owns their ancestral home ? represents herself as
effectively ?white? nationalist, which is both extremely surreal and
another indication of Goan powers of assimilation.

Whatever you may think of Braverman?s opportunism, the best way to
understand her career is in the continuum of nationalist politics that many
other ambitious diasporic Goans have engaged with over at least five
generations in India and Pakistan, Sri Lanka (where the editor Armand de
Souza is credited with awakening Sinhalese anti-colonialism), Kenya (where
Fitz de Souza represented the Mau Mau and helped write the Constitution,
while Goan-Kikuyu intellectual Joseph Murumbi Zuzarte was Vice-President),
Angola (via the iconic freedom-fighter Sita Valles), and Mozambique (the
influential Pan-African revolutionary Aquino de Bragan?a). Each is an
amazing story, but also similar in being woefully understudied, the
consistent problem for Goan history and especially when it comes to the
diaspora. It is that broad context that makes Selma Carvalho?s new *Guts,
Glory and Empire: The Epic Story of Goans in Zanzibar 1865-1910* (Speaking
Tiger) so welcome, and an important landmark achievement.

Carvalho is an unusual multi-faceted and highly motivated constant presence
in Goan (and increasingly Indian) letters, and this is her third book from
the New Delhi-based publisher Speaking Tiger, after the novels Sisterhood
of Swans (2021) and *Notes on a Marriage* (2024). *Guts, Glory and Empire*
is actually her fourth book about Goans in Africa, after *Into the Diaspora
Wilderness* (Goa 1556), *A Railway Runs Through: Goans of British East
Africa* and* Baker Butcher, Doctor Diplomat: Goan Pioneers of East Africa*.
Alongside, she writes columns and short stories, and edited three volumes
of *The Brave New World of Goan Writing* anthologies, along with editing
and publishing the admirable Joao-Roque Literary Journal online.

*Guts, Glory and Empire* ?is not a narrative of subjugated people,? writes
Carvalho, in her useful introduction, instead ?a story of how one uppity
South Asian community ? Goans- came ashore as sailors, cooks and clerks,
and went on to become merchant princes and philanthropists, infiltrating
every sphere of the sultanate from the musical to the medical, creating an
extraordinarily empowered South Asian society. These chameleon-like men
with their easy facility for language, mercantile adventurism,
administrative efficiency and personal charisma tended to the sultans as
doctors, traders, musicians and interpreters. They became both agents and
detractors of empire?s political theatre in the Indian Ocean. Their arrival
on an island which would play a crucial role in the carving up of Africa,
their meteoric rise to power, their place wedged between South Asians and
Europeans, their immense but entirely forgotten contribution, and their
poignant decline within a generation form the central premise of this book.
Inevitably, it is an attempt to reclaim the weblike connexion of Indian
Ocean histories.?

There are many things Carvalho does well here, albeit accompanied by some
characterizations and conclusions which would not meet full approval of
professional historians, but the main thing is everything is backed up by
copious notes, and all the relevant references and sources.

I especially appreciate how she worked with the genealogical expert Richard
D?Souza to contextualize her subjects? backgrounds, and relied on oral
histories and original archival sources in multiple countries. The results
are not exactly academic, but so what? This writer had to persevere outside
academic privilege to tease out storylines only she had the gumption to
research up to now. Let us appreciate this significant contribution for
what it is, on its own merits.

One of the reasons *Guts, Glory and Empire* is valuable ? and every serious
library in India should get a copy ? is its focus on the strategically
vital islands of Zanzibar off the Swahili coastline, now part of Tanzania.

In the second half of the 19th century, its Sultanate was subjected to
British ?protection? and became the main staging ground for expeditions and
exploitation of the mainland, with great historical consequence for both
colonizer and colonized. Thus, it was in Zanzibar, where Carvalho writes
?the complexion of Goans as colonised subjects changed. Within the walls of
the Portuguese consulate with its shuttered windows, Portuguese flags, two
desks, wall-clock and wash-basin, elite Goan men gathered on Friday
mornings dressed in their best suits for a visit to the sultan?s palace on
Eid days or some such ceremonial event. A new self-awareness was
percolating for these men, that of autonomy. Here, they could direct their
energies toward their own futures and fortunes. Here, their budding
republicanism found free reign, emboldening them to question empire?s
authority, to challenge it, and demand for themselves equal rights.?

Make no mistake, this is hidden history to all extents and purposes, even
if many Goans know it as their family background. In-between experiences
like these ? like ours - are inconvenient to assimilate into simplistic
nationalistic narratives, but that is precisely why their retrieval and
re-framing are all-important right now.

?By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Goans were an indispensable
part of Zanzibar?s national character,? writes Carvalho, with great
feeling, ?Goans who managed the government press, the government post
offices and the royal stables. Goans dominated the retail trade, they
redrew Zanzibar?s architectural skyline, they fashioned its public square
with a weekly orchestra, they provided medical care to the royal family,
ran pharmacies, boarding houses, produced church music, theatre and
organised dances at their club. Significantly, they made prompt and large
donations to charities and relief funds, and funded the English newspaper
by advertising on it. In September 1898, the sultan conveyed his thanks for
the ?loyalty of the Goans in Zanzibar who had always supported and assisted
His Highness? Government.? As the nineteenth century drew to a close and
the edges of empire hardened in East Africa, Goans resisted British
interference in their affairs but eventually became loyal subjects. The
British, even as they favoured these ?honest, hardworking and loyal set of
men? as their clerks, also disempowered them, erasing their individual
agency and autonomy. With the cast of flawed characters chronicled here, we
gain a sense of these lives, their values, their ambitions, their petty
jealousies, their absorptions, their politics and their ambiguous place in
race relations. This is a unique glimpse of a nineteenth century South
Asian society and its engagement with the Arab sultanate and Indian Ocean
empires.?


End of Goanet Digest, Vol 21, Issue 318
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