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Among the various colorful 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
colorful 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 high, 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 passtimes.
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