A Tale of Two Cities - Walking the Labyrinths of History

Goapuri and Velha Goa A Tale of Two Cities - Walking the Labyrinths of History

"The street of his capital was completely filled with the palanquins of his pandits, constantly passing, the poles of which were covered with jewels, and inside which were quivering the golden earrings of their owners."

- Degamve grant of Sivachitta-deva cited by J. F. Fleet,

in Inscriptions relating to the Kadamba Kings of Goa, published in The Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society

A special section at the end of the book: Some Cultural Aspects, highlights the features that distinguish Goa - architecture, interiors, garments, music, cuisine, jewellery. The cuisine section carries recipes by the well-known culinary wizard, Rosa Costa e Dias, hailing from one of Goa's oldest Christian families. We have other sections: on coins, contributed by the internationally famous Goan numismatist, Fenelon Rebelo; on the evolution of Goan garments, particularly the gorgeous and exotic pano baju, once worn by the Goan crème de la crème, a piece researched and written by one of India's famous couturiers - Wendell Rodricks; on "old modes of transport", a resume of the original Portuguese work involving painstaking research and some excellent drawings by the late Gozanga Miguel Agapito de Miranda. And we have a critical assessment of conservation of monuments by Percival Noronha, the founder member of Heritage Society of India, Goa Chapter. To all of them, a Big Thank You.

ANOTHER BOOK ON GOA?

" ... e não se pode saber o começo disto"

- Afonso Mexia, Foral dos Usos e Costumes, fifteen twenty-six

Afonso Mexia was the first Vedor, a kind of auditor general and chief accountant, of Estado da India, the centre-piece of a "far-flung thalassic empire", as Professor Charles Boxer describes it. The Vedor was the most powerful official of the empire, next only to the Viceroy and had, if he so wished, direct access to the Crown. In other words, he could disagree with the Viceroy and make a grievance of it. Mexia, a very conscientious officer, left behind one of Goa's history's most important documents, the Tombo Geral, a detailed land survey. And while at it, he set himself the task of unveiling the origin of the land and its institutions if only to end throwing up his hands in despair," ... e não se pode saber o começo disto," one just can't fathom the begining of it all ...

Nor does one have an idea of the number of books written on Goa, from Vedic times to our contemporaneity. A Jesuit participant in the first Indo-Portuguese history congress held as a kind of celebration of the new chapter of Indo-Portuguese amity, opened by Dr. Mario Soares, the then minister of external affairs of the by now democratic Republic of Portugal, told the media at one of the coffee-breaks, that he had in the library of his research center "three cupboardfuls of books on Goa by travel writers of various nationalities". Some of them spies, some saints and almost all of them great raconteurs of what they saw and experienced in their quest of adventure. Not a few had a very inventive mind and their accounts of locations they had never been to were masterly crafted, based, to an extent, on the memoirs of other travellers they had relished and sought to embellish. Soares had signed a few months earlier a treaty, with retrospective effect, validating Goa's merger with India in nineteen sixty-one. Till then, nineteen seventy-four, the acquisition of Goa had been, so far as Portugal was concerned, an act of naked and unjustified aggression. All this while, nearly eleven years, the Vatican treated Goa as a de facto Indian territory, but not de jure, an ambivalent position to say the least. As a result the Goa Archdiocese was governed by the Vatican through its Nuncio in New Delhi coadjuvated by a functional apostolic administrator, the auxiliary bishop Francisco da Piedade Rebelo, of Goa. Officially, however, the last Portuguese archbishop, an Azorean called Dom Jose Vieira Alvernaz, continued to preside, if nominally, over the Goa archdiocese till nineteen seventy-five.

Not much later, nineteen eighty-two, Professor Henry Scholberg, would publish his unique and very valuable work Bibliography of Goa and the Portuguese in India. He catalogued hundreds of titles, sought data in over eighty locations, ranging from private collections to public libraries and famous treasure troves of knowledge, ranging from the Portuguese Torre de Tombo to the British Library and Asiatic Society of Calcutta to the Saraswati Mandal Library of Panaji.

In an appendix he publishes, albeit in a revised form, the paper he presented at the Second International Seminar on Indo-Portuguese History, held in Lisbon, in reciprocity for the one held earlier in Goa, The title: Literature of the Goan Freedom Struggle. Like Afonso Mexia, in fifteen twenty-six, he threw up his arms in utter helplessness. "Two kinds of writings are available to the scholar: that which came during the movement and that which came after it. And there are two sources: those who wanted Goa to remain Portuguese and those who did not . .. If one were to take all of the Pro-Indian writings on the Goa crisis and stack them one on top of the other, and if one were to take all of the pro-Portuguese writings,

stack them up, one would probably end up with two stacks of the same stature and weight. This is speaking both physically and metaphysically .... In the middle of all this was world opinion."

Many more books have since come out. They range from history to fiction, some of the fiction having historical roots, and distressingly, some of the history being, in fact, pure fiction. Some serious historians, too, underwent mid-life changes. Some who earlier had harshly castigated the Portuguese later confessed that they probably had been carried away by their biases. Some saw the black legends of the Portuguese in the sixteenth and later centuries in a new, more lenient, light; For instance, corruption, the much written about causal factor of Portuguese decline. It was now argued that it was no worse than corruption in Indian kingdoms or in the colonies and settlements of other European colonists, be they British, French, Dutch or Danes. It had been a way of life. And still is in the by now liberated colonies.

Various other facets were analysed by international scholars. Was Goa's culture a charming hybrid of East and West? No, was the answer of some socio-anthropologists. In their view it was essentially Indian. Certainly, was the way another set of observers saw Goa, similar in some aspects, unique in many others. And Goa was all the better for it. Because in the end, Goans had managed to amalgamate the best of both worlds and thus enriched their own primal culture. - a rather confusing term, considering that the territory that is now identified as Goa had a rich tribal culture before the advent of Hinduism. Other questions were focussed on the quality of life. Had it improved since nineteen sixty-one, after the Portuguese were ousted from Goa? Had quantity affected quality in areas like education, medicare?

Curious developments are taking place all the time and they are reflected in contemporary writing. While it is politically correct to emphasize Goa's Indianness and anything to the contrary would inspire controversy and vituperation, it is commercially profitable and yes, the done thing, to publicize Goa's cultural linkages with Portugal. Tourism is a major area thriving on Goa's "acculturation", if that should be the correct term to use. It has generated a great deal of literature, from guides to promotional texts, to names and titles of hotels, restaurants and entertainment establishments.

We shall be concerned in this book with the rise and fall of two of the two main capitals Goa had: Govapuri, the settlement of the Aryans that flourished under the Kadambas of Goa; and Velha Goa, the capital of the Portuguese Oriental Empire, an empire constructed by those who dared "beyond what human might could aspire" and fell, as all empires eventually do. Except that the fall of both of Goa's capital cities was slow, painful and sad.

We present in this book additional information that might interest some of the more curious readers in three appendices, the first on the archaeological remains of the two empires; the second on culture aspects; and the third titled "The In-between Places" describing the many exquisite places and landmark between the two former capitals of Goa. The book also contains excerpts from the author's earlier works covering aspects unique to Goa and relating to architecture, interiors, antiquities, music and jewelry.