By Edith M. Furtado
Issue no. 14
My father’s house was in Salvador do Mundo, Bardez, not grand by the standards of colonial Goa, yet, surrounded by fruit-bearing trees and flowering plants. The trip across the Mandovi in a noisy ferry, past the picturesque Penha da França Church was already a preview of the much-awaited freedom the children enjoyed at our paternal grandmother’s.
In conversation with Tina Athaide
Issue no. 14
Our ties to Uganda date back to 1927. My grandfather, Anthonio Athaide, was the first family member to move to Entebbe. He worked as an accountant for the Public Works Department and played cricket for the Uganda team. He married Elvina Fernandes in 1931 in Goa. She stayed back at the Athaide family home for another four years before joining Anthonio, in Entebbe, in 1935.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 14
Canada has been in the news lately for the implied racism of its prime-minister Justin Trudeau. Perhaps what’s relevant to the large number of Goans settled in Canada is not Trudeau’s faux-pas but questions about Canada’s history of racial exclusion and how it might have impacted their lives.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 13
We exist outside of ourselves. This moment of consciousness is the birth of literature – the ability to perceive ourselves and to give form to perception is what allows us to introspect and immortalise experience. It’s a profound loss to Goans, that we grow up exiled from our own literary legacy.
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 Jugneeta Sudan
Issue no. 13
My chat series with him has been slotted between his scheduled work on two huge abstract works. In his red aachakan embellished with golden thread work and matching pyjamas he looks sharp, his silvery white beard and moustache offsetting his profile aglow with the sunrays filtering in through the open window.
By Roy Parras
Issue no. 13
Over a few years, I started to see visual changes occurring in the landscape. Fields that would welcome me into Curtorim with a green lushness to them were now slowly becoming uncultivated. This visual started to create a niggling thought in my head that in a way lead to an apprehension. I was wondering, what would it be for us if one day all of this faded into oblivion?
By S Gasper D’Souza
Issue no. 13
The store marks the way to my house. They call it the posro. It’s a small square structure, no bigger than ten paces across; a terracotta tiled roof rises like a pyramid. Rice, rye, and red lentils fill tin cans alongside chickpeas, chillies and cumin seeds, purveyed by a gentle, grey-haired man.
In conversation with Janet H. Swinney
Issue no. 13
My approach anywhere I go is to be an observer. And I mean observing without any preconceived idea of what it is you’re looking at. Looking and trying to figure out why things are done in a certain way, which may not be your way. Trying to figure out what the rationale is – because there will be one.
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 Paul Melo e Castro
Issue no. 12
Had anything been published in Goa in Portuguese? I’d never heard of anything. But after a little rummaging about I discovered in my own university library a copy of Vimala Devi and Manuel de Seabra’s A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa, a two-volume essay and anthology on Goan writing. If Goa’s literary heritage in Portuguese survives, and if it is still an object of study today, it’s in large measure down to Devi and Seabra’s efforts.
In conversation with Michelle D’Souza Cahill
Issue no. 12
It is problematic to harp on about appropriation without some consideration of the severe disproportion in literary representation and the subjective filters that invariably do apply. In other words, who is narrating the stories about cultural difference? Shriver was deplatformed in Brisbane. Her opening speech was insensitive to Aboriginal people and other minorities in Australia …
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 José da Costa Ramos
Issue no. 12
Panjim 2019, March, Fontainhas, mild weather. Dogs: no collar, no leash, sharing the public space. Technological ideology suggests the perfect observation of animals must be based on my total invisibility. I enjoy talking with dogs a foot from me. The animal scrutinises me across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension.
By Jugneeta Sudan
Issue no. 12
‘There is war, there is peace, and then there is ambiguous truth.’..Ashwin Kumar, filmmaker and part-resident at Sangolda, Goa, recently completed his trilogy on Kashmir. His third film No Fathers in Kashmir, which was released on 5th April, mirrors human stories of militants, uniformed men, politicians and the commoner with their multiple truths .
In conversation with Suneeta Peres da Costa
Issue no. 12
Jessica Faleiro in conversation with Suneeta Peres da Costa discusses Costa’s latest book Saudade. This is a coming-of-age story of Maria-Cristina, told from her point of view of growing up against the tumultuous political backdrop of pre-Independence Angola while still under Salazar’s rule.
By Savia Viegas
Issue no. 12
Back in the car, Yessonda reminisced about her father Angelo da Fonseca. A Gandhi cap, block-printed shirts and kolhapuris were his signature clothing. The bicycle was his only mode of transport. She followed him in all that he did during the day: shopped for vegetables, fish, cooked, dug around their little garden and painted.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 12
Newman is by no means condescending of those who visit the ashram. He seeks only to understand the fictive abstractions underlying the pan-India consciousness. Long before Yuval N. Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Penguin, 2011) popularised the idea that the human ability to create fictions was fundamental to evolution, Newman sought to understand a pan-India consciousness
By Ishaan H. Jajodia
Issue no. 12
While we know Orta today as a man for his medica materia, I would like to push for his recognition as an early antiquarian — probably the first European antiquarian in India. As Markham points out in his critical edition, it is almost certain that Orta was the earliest European visitor to Elephanta Islands.
