Vimala Devi's Bhatcars and the Mundcars: Laborers, Landlords, and Culture in Goa

Abstract

The master-servant, or broadly bhatcar - mundcar , relations are fundamental to Goan culture, history, and society. While the interaction of these two broad socio-economic groups, those who labor and those who do not, was and is fundamental to Goan politics, scholars have not yet evolved a methodological framework for understanding these relations. This absence, the paper claims, is a particularly serious problem for Goa studies, and one that can be tackled by thinking closely about categories such as bhatcar and mundcar . The terms bhatcar and mundcar are defined capaciously, making room for a range of servitudes and labor regimes as well as different ways in which the masters live as bhatcar s and the servants as mundcar s. This paper uses Vimala Devi’s Monsoon to formulate broad generalizations about the master-servant relations in Goa. The paper engages with the historiography of labor and caste in South Asia as well as Goan historiography to deepen the understanding of labor relations and culture in Goan society. . His research interests include the history of commodities and imperial and non-imperial polities in early modern South Asia. Menezes is interested in the role of South Asians—kings, merchants, and laborers—in the making of a global world (or ‘globalizing world’) since the 1500s. His research straddles the European and non-European spheres of South Asia’s globalizing history and tries to view these seemingly different components as forming a part of the same political economy. Occasionally, he writes about Goan literature written in Portuguese, Konkani, and Marathi.