Paper short abstract:

The poster will illustrate the first fieldwork results of the research on Konkani people in Kochi, India, where the notion of caste, ethnicity and postcolonialism interlay. The ethnographer has to meet the challenge of encountering different identity constructs, which the poster attempts to present.

Paper long abstract:

Konkani people migrated to Kochi in the sixteenth century, fleeing Goa from the Portuguese missionary politics. Kochi, was divided into Fort Cochin, which belonged to the changing colonial authorities, and Mattancherry, which was under the jurisdiction of the Raja. In Mattancherry the Konkani and many other groups of different origins settled, driven by their trading professions. The state of Kerala is a unique place in India due to its composition of religious groups, where only half of the population is Hindu. A significant percentage of Muslims and Christians is particularly apparent in the living space occupied by the Konkani. Religious groups are diverse not only in terms of religion and that is why I intend to focus on contemporary changes of castes towards the ethnicization.

I aim to present strategies of maintaining group identity by Konkani castes in a multi-religious environment of groups of various origins, in the postcolonial context. I am going to draw on the relationship between belonging to a caste and attachment to an ethnic origin and sustaining its heritage. I intend to contest the notion of caste as rooted in British colonial ideology and show my research on what is the group identity of people having their roots in the Konkan region - if its interpretation can be limited to the categories of caste, widely-held and simplifying the Kochi phenomenon, or rather it is also an ethnic phenomenon.