Who Are Chadd’ddi

Among the Christian Goans there is a community popularly called the chadd’ddi or chardde (I am deliberately using the word ‘community’ not ‘caste’). In Salcete it formed the majority of the population in my childhood; I do not know how dominant it was in the rest of Goa. Even more interesting was the fact that no village in Salcete had both brahman and chadd’ddi. So that when people wanted to know which community one belonged to, they simply asked for the village ! That happened usually while looking out for a suitable bride or groom, given the fact that these were then more or less endogamous communities.

This seems to have been the situation for long. Ignacio Arcamone, a Jesuit priest in Salcete in mid-seventeenth century, reporting to his superiors in Rome about what he called the Sasatana Peninsula, counted as many as forty-four villages being populated by chadd’ddi : Dividing the whole land of the peninsula into sixty six territories, he wrote, two territories were left to the primitive settlers (kunnbis or gavddis ?); fifteen went to the brahman, forty four to the kshatrya and five to other servants or adjutants, probably meaning the shudra. (Fernandes, 1981: Uma Descrição e Relação de ‘De Sasatana Peninsula in Indiae Statu’ Textus Inediti, 94)