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, 'Carnival Goa's own, unique, and
the Union Territories contribution to India's other expressions at
untrammeled 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 pastimes.
