The Search For Roots

Our search for roots, and therefore this series, will run on three parallel tracks - the people, their land and their language. We begin very far from this thin sliver of coast that we call Konkan today; for Konkan has ebbed and flooded. And the Konkanis have flowed over the mega continent. We seek their roots in the icy torrents of Sarasvatī as it hurtled down the mountains through its seven tributaries, withering the Himalayan rocks to fertilise its plains; and we seek their roots in the land made holy by the feet of Mahavira and Buddha, on the banks of Ganga and Brahmaputra, as they crafted their red and black pottery and wrought iron tools; and we seek their roots in the dense forests of Dandakaranya.

We follow them in their times of distress as the droughts drove them across mountains and through forests, sailing over seas and fording rivers in spate, continually seeking new lands for livelihood. We shall be witness to their wars, and mourn over their dead. We shall listen to their songs of joy and their lamentations of despair; and these shall become our records of history.

There is one unitary message that rings loud and clear through the ancestry of contemporary Konkanis : that we are all children of what in current parlance would be called ‘refugees’, fleeing from difficult times; ‘hard pressed by debts and taxes, forsaking their land and renouncing their king, and fleeing with household utensils and cattle’, as Ignacio Arcamone put it in his 1664 letter to his superiors in Rome. (Fernandes, 1981: Uma Descrição e Relação de ‘De Sasatana Peninsula in Indiae Statu’ Textus Inediti, 93).