50 years in the life of a culture keeper

The conflict between traditional and modern culture is constant the world over as an outgoing generation wages a furious battle with changing times to protect waning deep-rooted principles. Against this background, author and keeper of Goa’s cultural heritage Vinayak Khedekar comes as a radical breath of fresh air. It is his opinion that dying traditions must be bid adieu with a smile to make way for a new metamorphised versions.
Khedekar is 80, but his age belies his modern outlook towards culture and traditions, which is perfectly exemplified in the architecture of his house.Sitting on the cusp of the old and the new, the structure is simultaneously modern in its open kitchen structure as it is in its novel central ‘aangan’ or family space. That is exactly the philosophy with which Khedekar approaches his subject — Goan traditions, people and their way of life.
“A culture or way of life, call it what you may, must not be allowed to remain static in time for then it will die. It should always be encouraged to absorb from the contemporary environment, to mutate with incorporation of new creative ideas, all this while maintaining certain principal elements,” he says, adding that the old ideas will always have their space in documentation processes, for study purposes.
And that, Khedekar points out, is the beauty of the Indian culture, which continues to thrive and grow.
He was born in a priestly family and received no formal education. “I learnt Sanskrit in the gurukul system,” he says with the confidence of a man who is very sure of the knowledge he has gathered by completely shedding social prejudices. This has enabled him to draw cultural similarities between the original Hindus, Christians and Muslims of Goa. And from it evolved his philosophy ‘religion is of the individual or family, but culture is always of the soil’ that led to him becoming the first person to study Goan cultures in the context of all three religions.
In his eight decades, he has spent nearly six in the research of Goan folk art forms in particular, and culture in general, and he likes to emphasise that his work, unlike many others, is not based on “what somebody might have told me”. It is his idea that cultural expressions have to be documented with a scientific spirit and logic, where the curtains of ritualistic observances have to be parted to glimpse at the thought beyond.
His lifetime’s works are encompassed in 16 books that make detailed study and commentary of Goa’s culture from all possible perspectives — village, tribes, aspects and facets of observances, traditional technologies and knowledge, etc. He maintains that he is the only person in the country to have researched and written about traditional technologies. “And mind you,” he says sternly, “All my work is based on field study through direct participation and observation. Afterwards I always discuss the information I have collected with the locals to glean from them the why’s and what’s of their traditional practices.”
And to give his study a roundedness, Khedekar says he travelled extensively, throughout the country and even abroad. But those are all journeys within journeys. He truly set out on the path as a 12-year-old when his father told him to officiate a marriage ceremony. “I asked my father for the prayer sequence and he told me ‘don’t worry, there will be a lady there singing the marriage song and her words will give you the cue’,” Khedekar says with a silent chuckle.
That sparked in him a curiosity for folk culture and he made sure he grabbed every opportunity to get a glimpse into the local way of life. But he says a decade was to pass before that passion would be cemented and take a research turn. “In 1959, while returning from Mumbai my bus stopped for the night at the Polem border and I came to have a midnight tryst with a ‘khell’ performance in Angdi village. That was when I began my documentation,” says Khedekar, who has since dedicated his life to the preservation and propagation of genuine Goan folk art forms and culture.
Along the way he has donned many a hat, including that of author, member secretary of Kala Academy, scriptwriter, researcher, journalist, professional kirtan singer, director and even producer. But, through it all, his only dream has been to see the real and authentic culture of Goa showcased on the world map. “Goa is projected in a very wrong manner, when the fact is that we have a very strong culture,” he says.
His traditional job was priestly work, but he made Goa and its way of life his job and executed it with fiery singleminded passion. The journey that began in 1950 at age 12 is far from over with another book on the anvil. Meanwhile, his research goes on with the same wide-eyed enthusiasm.