Two worlds collide at a flea market in Anjuna.
Goa trance music is
a fast, hypnotic kind of techno, with fluctuating streams of bleeps, squelches and
soundscapes vaguely reminiscent of Eastern harmonics.
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Those who cannot dance say
the music is no good.
Jamaican
proverb
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‘Sex drugs and rock ’n’
roll’ is the traditional source of moral panic for parents and police. But in Goa,
parents fear that their youth will be corrupted by cultural imperialism
 In
a letter addressed to the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, the Goan activist group
Citizens Concerned About Tourism (CCAT) wrote in 1990:
“Over the last ten years, hippies and similar backpack tourists have virtually taken
over (…) They live here without visas or passports. … They lie around nude on our
beaches and practice and propagate free love and free sex. Drugs are an integral
part of their relaxed way of life. They are parasites who thrive by sucking the life-blood
of our nation—OUR YOUTH.”
While doing fieldwork for my Ph.D. on tourism problems in Goa, a former Portuguese
colony in southern India, I’ve encountered many such emotional reactions to the white
traveler/hippie culture existing uneasily in traditional coastal villages. These
reactions lead back to a general Goan patriotism, “tested” by the perceived cultural
threat of tourism, especially in the northern village of Anjuna. In the early 1990s,
hippie tourism gave way to one of the world’s most famous rave scenes with Goa trance
music, which not only attracts hordes of travelling ravers and package tourists from
the UK, Israel, Germany, France, Japan and other countries, but many local youths
as well.
Panic about young people succumbing to supposedly “foreign” pleasures: does this
sound familiar? Youth culture is, by definition, deviant. It subverts the meanings
adults give to decency and health, responsibility and tastefulness, night and day.
It’s not very surprising that adult disapproval results in hysterical media reports
and often in restrictions or police action aimed at subverting the subversions.
A
turning point in the 1980s
Though sociologists
have studied how generational aspects of moral panic are connected with class, gender,
ethnic and sexual dimensions, there hasn’t been much attention on the intercultural
issue. In Goa, moral panic becomes a North-South issue, one of insidious “cultural
imperialism”. Some local youth—boys, not girls who generally stay at home in India—are
thought to prefer Western music, drugs and sexual habits to “traditional VALUES like
honesty, hard work, discipline, good moral behaviour and patriotism” (CCAT). For
many parents, journalists and activists, white foreigners are forcing their culture
in a colonial way upon the helpless kids of Goa.
The reality is more complex. In the 1970s, the hippies lay naked and stoned on drugs,
listening to their music, while the locals worked for a living. Two radically different
worlds co-existed within the same village, but there were never problems to speak
of. In the 1980s, the party crowds grew to the thousands, the music became electronic
(thus louder), and the drug market better organised.
Goa trance parties traditionally happen at full moon, Christmas and New Year, on
the beaches, in forests and on hills. They are normally free, going on till late
morning, keeping the village awake with the throbbing kick drum. Goa trance music
is a fast, hypnotic kind of techno, with fluctuating streams of bleeps, squelches
and soundscapes vaguely reminiscent of Eastern harmonics. Anjuna’s hippie past is
reflected in fluorescent paintings and performances to match the music’s heavy psychedelic
thrust, further enhanced by the use of illegal drugs like LSD, Ecstasy and hashish—this
music isn’t called trance for nothing. The psychotropic atmosphere and imagery is
simulated on the Internet and at psy-trance parties around the world, from Slovenia
to Sydney, Thailand to Tel Aviv.
Many Goans also take part by selling chai (Indian tea), snacks and cigarettes or
by driving taxis, renting out rooms, bikes, party spaces and sound equipment. They
also sell booze, clothes, drugs, food, cassettes and paraphernalia, from chillums
(traditional Indian hash pipes) to incense. And because loud music after 10 p.m.
is illegal in Goa, cops and corrupt politicians can earn piles of rupees by routinely
charging baksheesh (bribes) for the parties and fishing for drug possession. In short,
Anjuna’s party scene is as much of interest to foreign freaks and dealers as it is
to Goans.
Yet this economic dimension is ignored by the media and activists. Instead they demonise
the scene as one which caters to foreign pleasures while corrupting Goa’s government
and seducing its youth. This is moral panic, articulated along a postcolonial, intercultural
dimension. Moral, because there’s always a puritan and patriotic undertone. Panic,
because the effects of Goa trance are exaggerated. Moral panic then gets in the way
of admitting that many Goan boys and men genuinely enjoy the parties without the
drugs (too expensive) and without sex (contrary to widespread belief in the area,
one doesn’t copulate at a rave). What’s more, growing numbers of much richer youth
from Mumbai (formerly Bombay) are discovering the rave Mecca in their own country.
Weekends and holidays are spent basking in the festive glory, although they are careful
to throw away their hippie clothes before returning to Dad, Mum and their yuppie
jobs.
I’m not saying Goans, Indian tourists, Mumbai yups, white package tourists, backpackers
and tranceheads all happily dance together in pluralist communion. I’m only saying
that the audience is extremely diverse, far more so than in the West. The starkly
ad hoc manner of organising these parties makes it difficult to call the phenomenon
a planned strategy of narcotics mafia, multinational capital, or wacko India-imitators
intent on turning the young Indian generation into equally wacko West-imitators.
It’s true that tourism, drug trafficking, corruption, and stereotypical imaging of
Goa/India all feed on the inequality existing in the world between North and South,
white and brown, rich and poor. But deducing that Goa’s youth has been sucked into
a “foreign” hedonism and materialism is a totally different matter.
Can we conclude that moral panic isn’t justified in Goa? Well, moral panic is never
justified, as it’s always based on exaggeration and misinterpretation. What is justifiable,
is putting things in perspective and in concrete terms. Many Goans make good money
during winter by virtue of the trance parties. Busting the events, as the government
and police seem eager to do lately, will hurt these poor locals much sooner than
the big hotel owners and drug dealers. The repressive climate reinforces corruption
and prevents open debate. And the tourists will only head someplace else.
Likewise, many local young men and Indian lower-class tourists enjoy dancing to the
music. Who are intellectuals and parents to argue that this fun is not “real” but
induced by foreigners? How do they know that the “friendships” between locals and
foreigners are purely utilitarian? Labeling Goa trance as “non-Goan” and “colonialist”
denies intercultural dialogue and possible solutions to the problems. Ironically,
the middle-class Catholic parent culture forced upon Goan youngsters is more clearly
a result of aggressive colonialism (of Portugal), than the Goa trance subculture
they’re flirting with. For it is nothing more than flirting: after the tourist season,
it’s back to Indian village or small-town life again. In the eyes of dancing Goans
and foreigners, Goa trance is Goan.
Now let’s accept that Goa trance is part of Goa. Does that resolve all of the problems?
Of course not. Pollution is part of Goa and it’s not okay. Many problems in Goa (like
pollution and corruption) are connected to rave tourism, but we cannot just blame
the tourist industry and foreigners. First, we need to identify the problems. A Goan
boy decides to pierce his nose in keeping with trance fashion. Is that a problem?
Or should we be more concerned that cops pay to be posted at the coast to collect
baksheesh? Let’s deal with the second first. Let’s not judge, like many Goan city-folk
do, from wild second-hand stories of the malign lunatics of Anjuna or from inconsistent
patriotic denials of intercultural exchange.
I sense the reader frowning. Listen to this European wise-guy spilling big words
about other people’s problems, calling them naïve and on top of that getting
credit for it… same old North/South domination but now on a university level. But
consider another possibility. Instead of hiding behind the façade of detached
social science, why not try to stimulate debate on how to solve Goa’s rave-tourism
problems?
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