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.
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 Jugneeta Sudan
Issue no. 11
Konknnichea molleant, the artwork by Loretti Pinto, is a significant and powerful metaphor for how weaving transforms conflicting ideas in our minds. The Aztec philosophy calls weaving a cathartic activity, and elaborates that weaving begins with fibre-dried grass stalks, bunched together into two groups, warp and weft.
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’ …
