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 pastimesn
