By R. Benedito Ferrao and Deborah Julia Al-Najjar
Issue no. 22
The past stays with us, this we know. But what we can be less certain of is how the future possesses us even before we arrive at it. Before 1991, India had only one television channel. That changed with the dramatic overhauling of the country’s economy in the last decade of the twentieth century.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 19
What becomes clear is that by the late 19th century, increasingly, metropolitan Bombay rather than Goa became the centripetal location from where Goan elite in the diaspora sought direction. The ambitions of Bombay-Goans like Leandro Mascarenhas, B.X. Furtado and Dr Acacio G. Viegas who were founding members of the Associacao Goanna de Mutuo Auxilio Ltd, the Uniao Goanna and the Instituto Luso-Indiano were mirrored in Pakistan and East Africa
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 19
Maria Augusta Elvira de Sousa is lost to history. She wanders its corridors, unclaimed. In accounts by European chroniclers, her ethnicity remains a shadowy unknown to be guessed at, presumed most likely to be a Portuguese woman. But I am determined to reclaim Elvira’s rightful place, because Elvira was a Goan.
By Malavika Neurekar
Issue no 18
The book is about people who want to belong and yet can't; that is to say the liminal subject. Now I know all about being the liminal subject. My mother is Mangalorean and my father was Goan, and so when I grew up in Goa, this liminality, of being not quite Goan, was an important part of my life.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 17
Nowhere in the history of nation states are the victims of an injustice or their descendants called upon to atone for that very injustice. This happens only when the narrative is distorted beyond recognition by special interest groups keen on creating a perpetual sense of victimhood.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 14
a 1930s ‘Christmas in Goa’: “Our host and hostess were a charming couple who lived on the revenue of their property and had a large house with many rooms to spare… Christmas dinner proved to be something like a private cabaret, the entertainers being the younger members of the family of our hosts. We sat around a long room and a bottle of vintage wine was opened. A young man gave us a tune on the fiddle and was loudly applauded. Then some of the boys and girls danced to the music of the gramophone. The proceedings followed the same sequence all over again – wine and further toasting, music and dancing and food.
By Anish Esteves
Issue no. 13
Sarto Esteves was born in Solvá, Raia, Goa, then a Portuguese colony, on the 28th of August, 1919 to Roque Piedade Felicio Esteves and Argentina Maria Esmeralda Geneciana de Piedade Quadros e Esteves. He was one of nine children in the family. He lost his parents at a very young age and later came to Mumbai for his education.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 13
Fitz must have deliberated long and hard on whether to make public these charges. As a researcher I have no way of verifying them. They might indeed be taken out of context. I too, have wrestled with my conscience whether to draw further attention to them. Nonetheless, the allegations are now part of our public discourse.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 12
There was one other thing, my DNA results told me. They provided me with a long list of people, I may be related to. My closest cousin was identified as a Fernandes, many 4th cousins were identified as Costa, Figueiredo, Barreto, Marquis, etc, but this is where it gets interesting: among my 6th and 8th cousins were a Shenvi and Pai.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 11
Shirley L. Gonsalves’s book The Luso-Indian Stethoscope (Goa 1556, 2019), is an extraordinarily incisive look at the mandarin class the empires of Britain and Portugal created in the Indian subcontinent, and how these early transnationals heralded the golden age of intellectualism and public philanthropy.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 10
Pacing his office, badly served by his predecessor and left in a ‘chaotic condition,’ Lieutenant-Colonel Bremner knew nothing good would come of his posting to Goa. Outside lay a land shorn of adventure, a land whose weather he found to be ‘unbearably sultry,’ whose Southern European colonisers spent their time in ‘cheery inebriation’ …
By Jugneeta Sudan
Issue no. 8
Quixotically Vamona read chivalrous texts passionately and then implemented the ethos into his existence. Regrettably, reality had moved away and become inequitable, random and prejudiced. It did not share his faith in codes of chivalry. Every time he was subjected to physical abuse and psychic tortures, he drew courage from his readings …
By Lawrence Nazareth
Issue no. 8
Nairobi grew progressively, from a railway station and frontier town into the capital city of a newly-established colony, the forested fringe had given way to segregated, residential suburbs; for example, Parklands and Muthaiga, where only immigrants of European origin were permitted to live.
By Clifford Pereira
Issue no. 7
Growing up in rural Kenya in the 1960s and 70s, my knowledge of South Africa was filtered through the politics of the day, inflected as they were by East Africa’s independence from British rule. Looking back, I cannot help but wonder if the information I received about other parts of the continent arose due to the different colonial histories ...
